thelee

alas no. i completely forgot about helmet/godlike conflict. hmmm so no death godlike bonuses, but you would still be able to get +2 PL from potion and cheesily stack it with +1 PL from resting bonuses, so that's something. if you're willing to include eder with a berath blessing, you could add one more pet with a lash (amanita, +3% corrode lash to party)

just to repeat - Recall Agony would probably be the biggest lift you can add on top. It would functionally be a 30% lash on top of all the damage you do, if i understand correctly. But at this point you might try power level stacking, because you would be boosting a part of your equation with a lower base (prestige + empower). Death Godlike at near death, with stone of power, with potion of ascendancy, possibly with one of the foods that gives you +PL (you'd have to save/reload or something to get it to turn into a passive), etc.

you could effectively further boost the functionality with a con affliction on the target, and something like recall agony. i wonder if it hits a territory where you can one shot a troublesome boss of some sort. also lol if you had a chanter or furyshaper to get health restoration off damage, healing 150 health on a single hit would be insane.

i would also add that various streamlines mechanics have actually allowed for bigger mechanical depth. replacing most of the random buffs/debuffs in poe1 with the inspiration and affliction system is at, first glance, a huge streamlining. but it opens up the door for a lot more interesting combat interactions (since afflictions and inspirations counter each other), it also makes a lot of stuff easier to reason about. also a lot of mechanics (esp the ones that boeroer mentions - PEN/AR and interrupts) benefit from i think what sawyer called "de-murking." Making them more obvious and impactful. Interrupts were barely worth paying attention to in poe1, but are really critical for mastering deadfire. Same thing with PEN vs AR compared to DR.

deadfire community patch does fix the roll-to-hit the corpse part of white worms, which is an oddly annoying aspect of it.

yeah the qualifier that it's from an enemy hit is something i didn't think of. i find it a bit odd that such a qualifier exists, it's apparently optional, and that some instances of "on being hit" don't have that qualifier. probably an oversight on those few items. though i did find it amusing with a test paladin/druid i spun up that would trigger Inspired Defenses and stacks of Retribution while standing on their wicked briars. not sure i can do anything decent with that though.

dang is this another Constentin discovery? I didn't know this. I wonder if there's some metagaming/new-cheese potential here. Surely there's more "on being hit" effects from gear. I only knew about Auroch.

even though it's extremely cheesy, there's something very satisfying about seeing a chain of lightning bolts get triggered off a proc, especially if your crit rate isn't maximized so it doesn't always go crazy. it's like playing a slot machine. if you add in an energized inspiration (very easy with least unstable coil, synergizes with avenging storm, as if avenging storm + effort needed any more help) you also stunlock the enemies as you bolt them to nothingness.

hang on, are you saying that when you cast avenging storm, that counts as an attack against the caster for veteran's maneuver?

i'm not aware of any guides, but it's relatively easy to sneak past the first island. i did so in my ultimate run (put it at 2x speed and skip like the first 10 minutes or so): i'm sure other ultimate video runs (if you can find them) will also feature sneaking on the first island, because it's frankly not worth the risk or the time to take on some of the big unnecessary fights. edit: if it's just a matter of being unenjoyable at low level, there's a berath's blessing that starts you off at level 4, have you given that a try?

the big problem is that deleterious alacrity of motion (which priest doesn't get) is a huuuge survivability boost for an up-close glass cannon that comes online much earlier. it requires some micromanagement, but it essentially means that you don't even need to rely on things like wizard's double or arcane veil for most protection (just for ranged) because you just constantly run out of range of melee attacks. (so you can spend those spell slots on other buffs or utility, like infuse with vital essence) eventually BDD + SoT is better than anything, but that also comes up against my general resistance to using cheese in my runs unless absolutely necessary

IMO universalist is pretty hard to make truly synergistic; "more heals" is a bit overkill given how good of a healer druid already is. i had a build in these forums that made it like a "keeper" from wc3, but what might actually be more synergistic is to go wael + whatever and make it a flameblade or spiritshift build that uses wael magic for protection. i got great mileage from doing wizard + druid with flameblade and ring of focused flame doing essentially something similar. priest lacks as many fast self-buffs so you have more action economy issues (and no deleterious alacrity of motion), but it might still be pretty good.

yeah the +1 AR from stalker is really good. i've done the same (with bear). but also with antelope (extra AC on top of higher AC). honestly i am not terribly scared of fort and will attacks, at least early on. better deflection and really good reflex (getting caught by drake breaths, man) do sound better to me than mostly irrelevant-in-early-game AR. i'll admit i've never done boar, but that regen seems too slow to be that good.

i don't doubt it might be outdated (that section probably hasn't been touched since 1.x), i'll add it to my queue for next update. yeah, though for me the damage of the animal companion isn't very important. i mean, it's important for ranger's overall dps in general, but overall i get more value for most situations just as a source of engagement (with protective companion), so survivability is more important to me, unless i'm ghost heart. yeah it's not bad, that's why i specified it's better mid-late game when you get some scaling. IME AR is just really hard to make relevant in the early to early-mid game in PotD, which is also the hardest part of the game. IIRC a bear companion will have 8 AR at game start (5 + 2 bonus + 1 default fine bonus). Against even a lower-pen attack (like 6 PEN) thanks to PotD scaling you actually get 0 survivability bonus compared to a non-bear (thanks to the +2 PEN from difficulty). it'll protect you a bit from overpenetration (esp crits) but not by much. and then against harder enemies, forget about it, even with zealous endurance or a tier 2 constitution inspiration you may still get 0 DR. it's only really as you keep scaling up and enemies start capping their scaling (or vs spell-based-scaling scaling up too slowly) and/or you get tons more reliable sources of AR boosts or PEN debuffs that it really helps alot. (edit: same goes for players, really. even when you first get heavy armor it's underwhelming the protection versus the cost because of how asymmetrically weak heavy armor weaknesses are. in terms of early armor, it's the exceptional medium armor you can steal from dark cupboard that imo starts having a real impact on survivability and almost exclusively because it covers its weaknesses better than heavier armor)

i'm actually partial to antelope for PotD. AR boost is kinda hard to see gains from until scaling from mid-late game, even with resilient companion, bc it's such an arms race against enemy PEN. Meanwhile +10 to all defenses helps all the time, even if subtly. But large size on Bear is pretty handy when you need a body to do some body-blocking (may be dependant on your willingness to micromanage though).