thelee

wait what? maybe there's a language issue. but can you actually see in the combat log: someone attacking your character with weyc's robe on, and that someone misses? that is the necessary precondition to register something for unlocking weyc's robe. please absolutely verify this, because i'm not sure we're on the same page here. when i had an issue with marux amanth not counting fire damage, what I had to do: 1. sever soul link 2. un equip it. 3. save the game. 4. *COMPLETELY EXIT THE GAME* 5. load the game from #3. 6. re-bind it. 7. re-equip it. step #4 is important because simply reloading a game without exiting doesn't always clear everything from in-game memory, so if there's a bug going on, that bug will persist.

when it comes to gear, sometimes it's worth just having both sets of items and changing before hte fight. i do that with e.g. marux amanth.

if you're not going shifter, then meppu/roe, ooblit, and strand of favor might be useful items to extend spiritshift duraiton. though who knows, maybe by the time you can get +10 intellect from monk, all of that might be moot.

+1 to this. I sorely under-appreciated driving echoes until a couple runs past when I (for once) single-classed a cipher. Once I started using it, I just didn't stop - it really solves all sorts of dps ills. (even when you're not underpenetrating, it can give you such a huge boost that you start overpenetrating, which is a really efficient damage boost for spells)

in poe1, cleansing flame suffered enormously from a jump bug and the fact that it was very hard to actually land it on enemies, but if none of those problems surfaced its ugly head it would absolutely shred. i found it almost comically unfair how eagerly lagufeth broodmothers use them on your own party. in deadfire, it is both less good than poe1 and also better. the stats are worse (doesn't synergize with dots, doesn't cleanse as well) but it's easier to land and the jump is absolutely reliable. the other spells though, honestly i'm surprised you found them underwhelming. they turned the priest into a fierce fire dps monster. yeah, there's your problem there are some great foe-only dots (all the insect ones), but you'd be leaving quite a bit on the table.

priest -> pillar of holy fire, cleansing flame, storm of holy fire, shining beacon. they all start coming mid-late game. divine mark and pillar of faith and warding seal can work in a pinch early on, but priests are definitely late bloomers. druid -> pretty much each DoT they have is extremely efficient damage, starting right away at tier one with touch of rot - they just take time to work their magic. their non-DoTs are less effective than wizard (or even really priest IMO), but they generally ride along with some neat debuffs that make up for it (returning/relentless storm, blizzard, embrace the earth talon). dancing bolts and burst of summer flame are exceptions and i find them a bit underwhelming (though dancing bolts has a huge party-friendly radius), similaly talon's reach (though the latter is helped by all the easy ways druids have to boost beasts PL). chanter as bellower also is extremely good with the lightning bolts invocation, the one that sends frost damage out in multiple directions (especially if you position it in a way taht one enemy gets hit by multiple bolts), and the corpse explosion one. a troubadour and skald can also do well with them, just from phrase generation efficiency perspective. (unfortunately, the frost invocation is pretty much useless for an entire DLC, but when you first unlock it, you pretty much carry the entire party for a while, such is the sheer damage you can output especially with bellower +PL)

wow it's really neat to see that this tiny mechanics re-clarification has opened the doors to some interesting new builds!

you know, the one that creates a bunch of mirror images around you! lordy, that spell is one that i keep writing down as arkemyr's in eveyr context, even though i know lore-wise it makes no sense and it's obviously citzal's. *sigh*

if it's any clue one or both of them also don't count as the type of weapon. i forget which, but either {kalakoth + self: is ranged weapon equipped} and/or {arkemyr + self: is melee weapon equipped} didn't work. i didn't have this problem when it was caedebold's black bow or concelhaut or the pike. i ended up just scripting fassina with "is threatening anyone in melee" to trigger my melee-based buffing and differentiating from kalakoth's.

it needs to have an attack roll. i think the initial application of come/come or dragon thrashed will trigger it, but not subsequent ticks. i could be wrong about the initial part, but ticks should not.

ever since windows got the linux subsystem on it, i'm going to be one of those grognards recommending people taking a look at bash shell scripting and VIM (my most recent mechanics find was based on some shell scripting and vim)

has anything changed or is it still a once/encounter ability? because it was extremely lame and borderline pointless when that was the case

In the backer beta it used to PL scale. So it was a deliberate decision to make spirit shift not scale, which is odd from a balancing perspective, especially since it hurts the boar form (its HoT and DoT don’t scale because they are on the spiritshift) but leaves bear and cat forms fine (their abilities are separately granted and DO appear to scale at last check).

ranger tranquilizer shot is probably even better than what a wizard can do, because it takes 30 seconds off (better than temporary arcane suppression most of the time), only targets deflection (arcane suppression targeting will can be annoying because casters tend to have good will defense), and you can spam it since it's only 1 bond (helpful when the enemy just keeps trying to rebuff themselves). it also interrupts. priests have some small effects - cleansing flame takes off -5, and magran's might takes off -2 per projectile (but gets both beneficial effects and also hostile effects e.g. the ones you debuffed the enemy). magran's might also interrupts per hit, so it can be a great way to shut down casters. however, unlike arcane suppression, cleanse, or tranq shot, these are targeted spells, so are pretty much useless against arcane reflection - they'll just bounce back at you street sweeper is a quarterstaff that by default -5 beneficial, -5 hostile and can be upgraded to instead do one of -10 beneficial or -10 hostile. somtimes i don't even upgrade it because being able to take away both is sometimes useful to cleanse enemies but also save my allies from nasty debuffs (charm/dominate, disintegrate, cleansing flame, etc.) edit: i forgot that call of rymrgand also cleanses, and is better than magran's might at this. it's -5 beneficial effects per pulse.

i actually immediately started thinking of a shifter/streetfighter (or shifter/trickster + scordeo's for extra hardiness) build after seeing this in action. deathblows + streefighter dmg + streetfighter -50% recovery should mean a pretty hefty sustained raw dot when in boar form. but yeah, the monk should also be great. monk: never a bad choice.

interestingly, because the way DoT stacking works (ticking the entire stack immediately upon a new stack and refreshing the tick interval) and because by default spiritshift forms dual-wield their weapon (making attacks possible to be faster than the 3s dot tack), it is highly likely that under sustained attacks the DoT functions almost identically to a straight-up 30-40% raw lash (depends on how many stacks you can keep sustained with your intellect and enemy resolve), which is pretty good (especially since it would be multiplicative of any existing lash)

Note that most other similar effect I can think of is ApplyOverTime and is therefore not as good as this due to the typical numbers involved. The bleeding modal for axes is basically the same thing as the boar dot though (down to the same %age, but a much longer duration at the cost of +50% recovery)

(Apologies if people already knew this, but at least my own guide and the wikis are wrong on this) I was just trying to square some oddities I found with some effects while doing a guide update, and pretty much every major source has been wrong about the spiritshift boar DoT since the beginning. I think it started with MaxQuest's aggregated spiritshift info from the backer beta (not his fault, it was speculation based on some shortly observed data; it may have even been accurate then but it was changed and no one bothered to look closely again). Most everyone (including myself) repeats or understands that the boar spiritshift damage over time is 4 raw damage per tick, and that the tooltip is buggy and shows 0 instead. This is wrong. The reason why the tooltip appears to be 0 is because it actually uses a rarely seen effect, where the base effect is just used for its duration and the "real" effect is triggered by damage done ("ApplyStatusEffectToEnemyByDamageDealt"). It makes sense why OBS wouldn't/couldn't fix this tooltip, because it's conditional on damage done, so it's a little more complicated than plugging in the real number (which many people thought was 4). The boar DoT is actually 10% of actual damage dealt per tick, for 6s (adjusted for intellect). It stacks, too. On the one hand, this means the boar DoT is much much worse for dealing with penetration/immunity issues, because it won't help you (as the original understanding of the boar dot was) in fights where you're not doing much damage with your claws. On the other hand, this means the boar DoT is *extremely* good as an additional damage bonus in normal fights. At base intellect, because it stacks you essentially get a 30% raw lash (over time; 10% lash on initial application, plus two more ticks). Every point of intellect above 10 effectively adds 1.5% to this lash (over time). Because it's based on damage done, it should be inclusive of any wildstrike lashes, making it multiplicative of a multiplicative effect. So as an example, a level 20 spiritshift boar with modest 15 strength and modest 15 intellect and greater wildstrike will do 13-20 +75% base damage, plus a +25% multiplicative elemental lash, plus a further 37.5% raw DoT lash over 7.5s.

i would say as a starting point like: 10 might / 13 con / 17 dex / 10 per / 18 int / 9 res and adjust depending on what maximums you can get from your race, and what bonus you get from a background. intellect is king stat for casters, and dex is a king dps stat (and also protects you from interrupts by reducing cast times). blood mage/solo will care about survivability a bit more, so putting in a bit more into constitution than i would typically do for a ranged caster - plus health is an actual casting resource for a blood mage, so i wouldn't hesitate to add more if i had spare points or items. (a priest of skaen can boost con further with prayer/litany for the body. consecrated ground would also be a pretty good spell since the additional drip of health can also give you more spell casts)

Absolutely try what boeroer suggests before declaring it a bug. if that doesn’t work, it might be similar to a marux amanth soul bound bug. But try boeroer’s suggestion first before I tell you how to deal with that one.

you can get the icepicks from him (what you need to progress) without recruiting him. you can even kill him as part of the dialogue, if you want.

BM/priest of skaen will give you tons of utility. tactician will give you brilliant, but bloodmage doesn't need brillant as much per se because they can regen spells anyway, and priest of skaen will give you combo potential with wall of draining and BDD (possibly also salvation of time though you do need brilliant to make that work, but there are other sources of brilliant than just tactician). from a solo survival perspective, you also get shadowing beyond to escape fights so you can pick off an enemy or two, invis your way out of hte fight to reset, and try again. imo the really important spells are: slicken, concelhaut's crushing doom, arkemyr's brilliant departure, wall of draining. everything you can else you can take it or leave it.

you should probably acquaint yourself to how power level scaling works. but at only tier 4 spells and no other +PL bonuses or further intellect bonuses i would expect aloth to be unable to get a 2 round combusting wounds.

silly question but... are you actually putting your sorcerer in a position where they can actually avoid being hit by something? if you just sit back all the time wher enemies can't get to them, then they're never going to have attacks miss on them. it's not just deflection either. any attack roll that misses will count towards it, such as aoe attacks and such.

chanter summons (especially weapons) are very good, it's one big cornerstone of what makes chanters A+ class for high-end high-difficulty challenges (e.g. megabosses). but like boeroer says, if you haven't tried DLC, you should, because base game doesn't scale up to level 20 challenge very well. if anything, you might be surprised a bit if you rely on this too much because some enemies in DLC will actually cast dismissal and abolish your weapons in one smash IIRC.