thelee

a possible tweak is to avoid using alchemy skill points at all, just go all in on explosives and dropping resolve. you can toss sparkcrackers on yourself in stealth before a fight and keep trying until you succeed (though if you're too close to enemies you will alert them to your presence :P). with sufficiently low resolve and good explosives (and the gloves also benefit from intellect IIRC), you can probably get like 40+ seconds of streetfighter mayhem by mid-game. i forgot to mention that losing out on blunderbuss does hurt in being able to randomly sustain distracted in dense fights. sometimes i'd stick with my 1h+blunderbuss setup if i'm surrounded because riposte full attacks would trigger more powder burns. i actually don't know if this really made a difference, but just something to put out there.

in case you haven't seen it mentioned on the forums yet, but the general consensus is that gorecci st and the digsite are like the hardest fights in the game. so i wouldn't worry too much if you struggle in those fights, because everyone will likely struggle, unless you specifically tune a mercenary or character for those fights (sometimes i bring along a druid with both charm beasts and hold beasts for digsite [edit: though i feel like i'm unlucky and always get some group of beasts with "unstoppable" on galawain's challenge, which makes them immune to that]). especially i think barbarians have a rough early game because all their power kind of adds on to itself until they explode at higher levels. kinda like an old-fashioned power-curve of a wizard. dude your english is great no worries, i would not have even noticed anything was off if you hadn't said anything

yeah, i revised the build at some point (i forget if it's here or on gamefaqs) to drop resolve more, so that you can lean a bit more on sparkcrackers. unfortunately, everything outside the sparkcracker effect from the gloves got nerfed so that they only check once for the distracted effect, so you're going to burn more sparkcrackers to keep it up. i haven't played the build in 5.0 through the entire game (just to make sure certain interactions still work), but when i played this earlier on, IME blunderbuss was mostly important for the early to early-mid game. later on, with lots of points in explosives i relied more heavily on sparkcrackers and/or getting pummeled to and managing sub-50% health. you could probably make do with the blunderbuss tweaks, but the early game is going to be rougher and the later game more inconsistent.

yeah, it seems to me that the streetfighter synergy is very persnickety to pull off (requires crits). but imo i love scourge of bezzello for use against big fights like huana o whe, because it is a great way to wipe out concentration and constantly interrupt that ooze.

d'oh yeah. no matter how much i've played this game i keep flubbing names of stuff

fighter is still a decent all-around multiclass option and not just a defensive play, even outside tactician+brilliant shenanigans. adventurer/conqueror stance gives you up to +10 accuracy with spells. the barrage line of buffs gives you bonus perception, graze-to-hit, possibly hit-to-crit, and possibly also a source of acute (+5 int, +1 PL) that doesn't require a spell cast. rogue is also a good choice, esp assassin (the bonus to accuracy, pen, and crit dmg also works on spells, but you have to be a bit careful on what spells you use due to how differently invisibility breaks between different effects), especially if you're a wizard that can cast the arkemyr's invisibility spell (i forgot its name). if you want to be more martially, you can pick swashbuckler streetfighter and stand in a chill fog while you rapidly beat down on enemies with summoned weapons.

oh lol i completely misread and thought you were talking about FS, not the abbey, my bad

iirc you can do a surprising amount of sneaking around to avoid conflicts. for some of the stuff you don't need party-wide sneak, just one really good sneaker while the rest of your party hangs back, such as nabbing all the books in the basement.

tbf an MC assassin+druid/priest would be hot ****. it's just kinda weird that an SC assassin is pretty underpowered in terms of its theme. (perhaps if one could re-stealth in combat, like in the old IE games)

i think more accurately said, it has 10 PEN and gets up to legendary scaling for +4 PEN. so that 14 PEN also comes with huge +acc, and +dmg as well

IME getting active abilities to become passive is not consistent. In that Ultimate thread there are a few of us (myself included) that tried a lot of different ways to consistently reproduce stacking, and we could not (I tried zoning between areas, saving/reloading/relaunching). I ended up not relying on it for my Ultimate planning, though in the end I did get stacked effects IIRC. One might be able to say that the longer your game goes on and the more save/reload/relaunches you do, the more likely it is that your persistent active effects (food, drug, etc) will stack. (I had a beastmaster that casually benefited on being able to stack Devotions of the Faithful and the accuracy bonuses from Hunter's Claw, despite my inability to consistently reproduce stacking effects during my Ultimate planning.) It might also be path-dependent to trigger these sorts of stacking (e.g. maybe some effects are less likely or can be triggered to be more likely based on other effects, who knows).

lashing vine in vanilla game is (relatedly) the first generic druid summon with proper scaling. blights and even the mushrooms are mostly just varying levels of hp sponges in vanilla (don't know if your blight changes buff or scale them), whereas lashing vine might actually do some harm.

eh, i think it's a matter of taste (or role). Sunbeam at lvl 1 is a great free pickup, you get some healing (moon's light at 2), arguably the best tier 3 druid spell (returning storm), and one of the druid's best summons (lashing vine). shifter doesn't quite hit the same diversity of options for me. also in some (many) of my multiclasses, not being able to cast while shifted is a major drawback, since I heavily use cat's action speed ability to dump spells. shifter is definitely powerful for sure, just doesn't fit in the same niche where i'd pick animist.

they don't stack, possibly there's some confusion with the similar-seeming Arcane Veil effect from the equipment in FS, which does stack (since it comes from an item).

animist is nice, but imo while it's not in your consideration but lifegiver really doesn't give up that much (note: i haven't played with elric's blight buff, so i honestly can't speak to how much of a boost it might have been). i think lashing vine and possibly fire stag are the main ones i miss on a lifegiver, and that's only if you SC it. so personally it seems like lifegiver is the better "i don't know what to do they all sound great" selection. tekehu is very nice (i also like his foe-friendly "water" fireball and watery double) but in practice the damage diversity loss might be a bigger deal than you think (at least on PotD), so it's not exactly a "free lunch" as he may initially seem. (though of course in fights where his damage type can't shine as well, he's still an excellent healer) i find animist more useful for multiclasses, because they have a nice diverse selection of free spells that saves my skill points, without coming with downsides i might not want.

echoing @masterty66, in practice, since we're on a druid, we're talking about lots of aoe effects, frequently also in the form of dots. as a result, IoM will overperform quite a bit, especially compared to a hypothetical close-to-1v1 scenario. I also think you're understating the aoe as a bonus. by proportion, IoM has 10x the area of insect swarm. You can literally impact the entire battlefield with infestation of maggots, where sometimes you might struggle to get more than one target out of insect swarm. it's basically a one-cast fire and forget.

the fact that employees actually got some bonuses out of it hopefully takes some of the sting out of it landing like a wet thud at launch. it also kinda points to marketing being a major issue - outside of some black swan games like Breath of the Wild or Skyrim, I'm not sure it's very typical for games, even RPGs, to have such long tail of sales. Really seems like people are discovering the game on their own and it's standing up on its own merits in that context.

I actually think it's a great spell. Of course you're going to be doing other stuff to the enemy (hopefully), so the fact that it doesn't do much to healthy enemies isn't that big of a deal. iirc it does a base of 10 raw damage per tick, and scales from nothing at full health to gradually max damage at lower. So you'll always do some damage. The biggest advantage in the DoT scheme of things is the fact that it's raw and that it has a massive area of effect. Insect Swarm is great, but has a tiny AoE. Plus, IoM isn't the frequently-immune poison, which really hurts Plague of Insects a lot. Won't do you much in 1 on 1s typically (unless it's like a boss with infinity AR), but always feels great to drop in a big fight.

interesting! how does it work for the knock-up effects? does the enemy fly faster or slower into the air to compensate? i don't recall seeing a debuff running while they're being knocked up (hard to check obviously)

i did a sorcerer (enchanter/animist) and played it more like a martial. used ring of focused flames and flamebrand as a main weapon, with lots of fast cast wizard buffs (per Elric, helps the action economy alot that emerges around mid-game), and then filling things out with random (generally fire-based) offensive spells. it was a fair build (e.g. minimal cheese), but for a fair build I found it to be very effective. like you suggest, all the wizard skill points went to the druid side or to universal passives, relying on grimoires instead. the only exception was Deleterious Alacrity of Motion, so that it's always available. Those spell reflection wizard spells become a lot more useful when you're actually up-close and personal and actually likely to be targeted by enemy wizards. Being close makes it easier to target Druid spells like Returning Storm, Relentless Storm, Nature's Terror. You might think you're squishy by being two casters, but Deleterious Alacrity of Motion means you can almost never be caught by melee, and Form of the Delemgan even gives you dex immunity (help keep your Swift buff) and pierce AR, and of course druid has plenty of good heals to pick up if you need extra sustain. as a bonus, this was when I discovered that pure DoTs do not wake up foes put to sleep by Verschlummern, and between wizard and druid you have plenty of pure dots to use (note: touch of rot/autumn's decay don't count because of a separate instant damage at start, unless you cast it first and then put enemies to sleep). against fire resist/absorb/immune foes i'd use one of the wizard summoned weapons and taste of the hunt.

too bad it does like 1-5 damage or something, even with maxed out weapon damage bonuses it's not going to do much

taste of the hunt DoT is boosted by things like superb AND sneak attack? wtffffff why did i skip it on my current playthrough

did you recruit all the other souls? i find that if you're patient and have some sustain you can pretty much KO the second ner fight with using those other souls's abilities. my personal vote would be for either Frightened Child as well, if we're just talking about unique named fights. Not just the plethora of enemies and high-level abilities, but I really hate monk knock-up interrupts and in that fight in particular it can be really ruinous to have an ally get disrupted by a knock-up.

i'm still a little confused as to how this would work. ok, so the entire spell wouldn't repeat. but would the entire AoE effect repeat? So if you have 5 enemies being hit, and one of them triggers vithrak/marux amanth, only the one gets hit again? or all 5 enemies get hit again by another aoe pulse?