thelee

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i don't doubt it might be outdated (that section probably hasn't been touched since 1.x), i'll add it to my queue for next update.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).

do you have any mods?

To double-check: you just entered the oratory, and immediately went back out? And then when you came back in, none of the normal stuff with Maura triggered?

echoing Chaospread, honestly i'm super sour on corpse-eater for SC barb. Best part of SC barb is getting high level shout abilities, and corpse eater makes it 100% more expensive. if you're set on corpse-eater i'd multiclass it (so the +1 rage cost hurts overall less) and if you're set on SC barb i'd choose something else.

i find the huana voyager to be extremely useful in particular for this. load up like those double-barreled cannons and you don't have to waste time turning, just fire (you may even have a turn to hold position for greater accuracy). contrary to what i said earlier, iirc, rathun might be perfect case for grapeshot. IIRC they don't have surgeons, so once you disable their above-deck sailors, they literally can't sail anymore.

it shouldn't actually be killing off enemy combatants prior to a boarding fight. i could be wrong, but istr this is a deliberate choice by the designers. grapeshot can be very effective in low to mid ship fights. the problem is that it scales very poorly into high-level ship fights because surgeons are too good and there are lots of crew members. you can continue to get the enemy ship to cycle combatants around, but they will still have crew members to spare to shoot you down, while their injured sailors heal so quickly that you aren't causing any lasting damage. grapeshot in this case doesn't get you closer to winning, it just slows down how quickly you lose. the one exception is when you have high-enough-rank sailors to trigger events with some regularity, then you can waste tons more enemy time with grapeshot and the game sometimes glitches out and deletes sailors from ship combat (not boarding combat) while trying to move sailors around to deal with events. but cannonball shots also can trigger events, get you closer to winning, and can disable the ship surgeon AND ship cannoneers. for high level ship fights, there's only two good strategies and all other strategies are worse: 1. just cannonball the enemy ship down with the best DPS you can manage 2. use magranite flamethrower on a fast ship like your default or the voyager with high level cannoneers and just brute force the enemy ship down. the fundamental design problem is that they simply made cannonball do too many vital things (your main win condition, disable surgeon, disable enemy weapons [which is their main win condition]).

not enough uses of 1/x and 1/(1/x) in elric's math imo

Call to Slumber is actually enchantment. But very good if a bit touchy on needing to be careful with the micro.

yeah if you do this without save/reloading, the game will stop you at 20 stacks. however the game like... FORGETS what the current stack is and you start creating a new stack after some save/reload cycle. once again, i believe the game will stop you at 20 stacks with this NEW stack. but a save/reload will let you start creating a new stack. it actually ends up being extremely easy to stack this infinitely, just make sure you don't cap out at 20 stacks i think and the game loses track. i actually deliberately avoid doing this because of the combination of just how easy it is to pull this off and how degenerate it makes ranger and ranger multiclass.

nope. so based on other people loading my save, it's pretty clear that the bad state persists in the save game. i think what's happening is that something bad gets cached or something, because my original game eventually went back to normal and i could cast twin stones (from scrolls this time) just fine. i think the bad spell state got pushed out of the game cache after a certain point. however, the moment i reloaded my bad save (yes i kept it), everything got screwed up again. even creating a new game doesn't fix it. and it's bad in my current game now. i tried re-naming gameglobalobjects.lvl crosssceneobjects.lvl to see if bad data gets stored there, but i think that entire path just gets clobbered upon fresh game load from desktop, it didn't end up making a difference (and my renamed files disappeared). either way, my game is back into a bad state again and I've exhausted my patience for debugging this for at least another few days. edit: i noticed an issue in my current run with ninagauth's killing bolt. it's supposed to spawn a spirit if you annihilate a non-spirit with it. i did, and i spawned a spectre. then later, and then again a few more times, i killed a non-spirit with it but got no spectre. possibly related issue? some game object is getting lost and a reference is becoming broken? hmm