thelee

i don't have strong opinions on the different builds, but I just wanted to highlight a couple things - - one extra armor can seem insignificant, but it can also be the most important thing in the world. it all depends. you're not going to see much benefit on a cloth-y, but for a heavy armor tank especially on upscaling potd (where PEN/AR is an arms race with you behind), +1 can mean a full 50% damage reduction over not having that +1 (this is the case where you go from -50% PEN to -75% PEN); remember that negative effects aren't additive (edit: as boeroer says). these days when i'm building a character for the puproses of tanking damage, I zealously guard each +1 AR I can find, especially ones that stack. - the malus isn't that bad because a tank isn't moving around much. edit - BAH ninja'ed by boeroer!

in a vacuum that is actually probably ideal instead of a hatchet in my quick and dirty math. in practice, a hatchet can also debuff enemy accuracy -10 with its modal, and all you need to do is at least graze with it. so a hatchet gives you a 13-pt swing in relative defense against an enemy versus the 5 you get from a gladiator sword. i believe the only other effects that can emulate this is a wand modal (-10), devotions for the faithful (-10), or despondent blows (-15). so... it depends on other factors. gladiator sword is not a great end-game weapon, but hatchets aren't exactly world-beaters themselves IMO (except for xoti's weapon).

not +15 ?

i think whatever a dragon summon can do, an animated weapon summon can do almost as well, and there are some places where the animated weapons will out-perform a dragon summon. it is mostly a nice capstone for a single-class chanter, and frankly an ability i think is underappreciated because many people multiclass chanters or just sit around with animated weapons. if you are interested in doing something different with a chanter, then i cast a vote for a single-class chanter with a dragon summon as either a bellower or a troubadour, because either of those will be able to have 100% uptime on it. (A single-class beckoner is better off getting 8 animated weapons and a modern GPU instead). edit - where a dragon really excels is in large fights or against bosses. animated weapons (especially beckoned ones) can be destroyed relatively easily, especially where AoE is concerned. Dragons have tons of health and immunities so won't go down very easily. Dragons also have two pwoerful aoe abilities that have generous scaling (dragons have liek +20 PL), a tail lash and a fire breath. In SSS I've literally wiped out most of an arena fight with just a few tail lashes... i'm talking hundred+ damage per target per attack with extremely high PEN. edit 2 - the base dragon weapon stats are so crappy but the ability PL scaling is so generous you have to pretty make sure that the dragon is *always* using an ability.

the low level skeleton/phantom summons are a poor representation of the quality of summons chanters get later. they are good cannon fodder, but that's it. it's not until you get ogres that you get your first taste of tanky summons. and while animated weapons get all the love, a single-class chanter can summon a dragon which as i've mentioned in other threads in the past can literally facetank megabosses without dying (it doesn't hurt that what helps it against dorudugan is that it has fire immunity). the only time i've ever come close to losing a dragon was against a belranga that had almost 120-ish stacks of her damage/action speed buff.

like i said, engagement is not terribly hard to come by, and that's the main mechanism (otherwise there's no "aggro" in the sense of generating and managing threat like in a MMORPG). a fighter can get 2-3 engagement extremely easily (defensive stance, or any other stance plus a shield and hold the line), but other characters can get 2-3 engagement as well with a shield and other items (or a chanter chant, if we're counting only persistent effects). if an enemy breaks engagement to do something else, a chanter has summons to body-block or re-engage them without having to do an attack roll. i've personally found into the fray extremely underwhelming for "maintaining" engagement because of its need for an attack roll and because enemies rarely are positioned either in range or in a way such that i actually pull them into engage range (they get body-blocked by another enemy). it also costs a whopping two discipline. i think re: "on-demand" it's hard to overstate just how powerful brisk recitation is and animated weapons are. you start off basically being able to summon them at the start of the fight, which gives you a bunch of "on-demand" effects, and brisk recitation will mean that you have 100% uptime on it, while also rapidly generating other CC effects with invocations. At 3s per chant, the lag time is hardly there. because animated weapons can keep getting re-summoned, i even went so far as to setup a keyboard-mouse macro that spams "F, shift-click" as long as i hold down the macro button. every time i summon an animated weapon, i select the sword, hotkey knockdown to F, and then spam that macro on an enemy i want to disable for the rest of the fight. when that enemy dies (because the sword also does a boatload of damage and has tons of accuracy), i re-spam that macro on a different. rinse and repeat with each resummon. this even works on megabosses (except dorudugan who is immune to knockdown). even on a much dumber level, i've literally held big enemies in place with animated weapons and plunked at it form a distance, simply because the enemy has a big footprint and can't squeeze past my properly spaced animated weapons. put a whole different way, these days i make deliberate abstentions to try to maintain challenge in the game. in terms of builds, a herald is the main one i refuse to roll (even as a pallegina option) simply because of how easily it can trivialize the game without even doing anything exploitive (e.g. brilliant-based combos). i'm all a fan of exploring different options and finding strengths in other builds, and toying around with contrarian ideas to explore new creative avenues. there are plenty of good fighter builds and multiclasses, and you shouldn't feel pressured to not play one because you think you must play the "best" option. but by the nature of the thread and how well-established the metagame is on this particular point, i think you will find it an extremely uphill fight to convince people that a herald is not just an all-around superstar for carrying a party to victory against all the big challenges of the game. you can literally just outlast your opponents in some setups (e.g. brand enemy). (the only exception i can make is if vela is involved, because a herald by itself has no effective protection mechanism for vela.)

a shield and some deliberately selected gear (and the silver knight chant if you want) will give you plenty of engagement. you don't typically need more than three. a herald can also summon animated weapons, who can also tank for you (especially with the silver knight chant). the ability to close distance doesn't matter after the first moments of combat. a fighter's constant recovery eventually ends (and can be cleansed/suppressed away). i don't know what "on-demand CC" is (isn't all CC on-demand?), but whatever the fighter gets is no match for infinite CC. remember that a chanter can keep summoning animated weapons, one of which has up to 11 uses of knockdown: whatever fighter support you're thinking of a chanter can essentially keep re-summoning a version of said fighter support. this is on top of other invocations the chanter can use. remember that that the 10-pt dmg shield chant only refreshes every time it starts up again and any linger is irrelevant if depleted, so the "downside" of the troubadour's brisk recitation isn't even a downside - you can absorb 10pts of damage every three seconds, on top of any passive regen from exalted endurance or e.g. lethandria's devotion shield. E.G. against hauane o whe, you don't have to worry about symbiote at all. (and hauane and sigilmaster's cleansing are irrelevant because exalted endurance doesn't have a duration and you just refresh your damage shield in a second or two) all while getting invocations at almost 2x typical speed. the first couple runs i did that included megabosses i had a herald with me, not even in a tank format (one was pallegina, one was a custom troubadour/paladin). it was so utterly convincing of how powerful a carry it was for the rest of my party (the experience also single-handedly upgraded my estimation of the chanter in general, and i tried hard to underline a chanter's value when i wrote up the megabosses in my gamefaqs guide). i didn't even try to metagame the build/equipment that hard, especially the first time with pallegina, it was pretty ad-hoc. with more thought and some proper itemization, a herald will absolutely tank for you and carry your party. there's plenty of fun tanks to be made that include a fighter, but you are going to find it extremely hard to argue that a herald is not somehow the king of survivability and sustain.

yes. i think it'd be harder to time the mule kick properly (i don't quite know how delaying your turn works especially when it come to cast times), but you would halt any currently active action. unfortunately, in turn-based, the enemy might just rev up their action on the immediate next turn, so you'd have to keep it up.

mule kick doesn't interrupt per se. however, it will knock up dorudugan and cause it to require to stand back up again, even though normally prone (which is an interrupt) is prevented by concentration or interrupt immunity. the same thing is true for monk's knock up ability. this also works on the oracle and the memory hoarder in FS (who are interrupt immune). edit - unlike a true interrupt, knock up alone won't waste the enemy's resource when properly done during their action. however, you can mess up AI scripting a bit to buy yourself more time because enemies don't always try the same action again--they might do some other stuff for a while. more importantly, for a tactician, the brief window when an enemy is knocked up in the air, they are treated by the game as not being in combat. this can be bad if you have attacks or spells in mid-flight, because they'll whiff against the enemy. for a tactician, though, that brief window is enough that--if that was the only enemy around--you temporarily gain briliant. you lose brilliant as soon as the enemy lands back on the ground and re-enters combat, but a second or so of brilliant is all you need to restore a resource. in my ultimate run i would mule kick enemies if they were the only ones around, to help restore resources for the priest half of my character.

whatever you do, i highly recommend supplementing your build with hel-hyraf/the shield breaks invocation and geting animancy cat. the combined benefits of the two will have it so that even the summons that you have that don't scale will still be relevant as enemies get tougher armor. (magran spells will also love having enemies subjected to the shield breaks for its own damage purposes)

yeah - i agree with as you mentioned upthread, they spent alot of the "budget" on the instakill effect, but in practice it's so slow to build up phrases and the cast time is so slow that it's much harder to use opportunistically as an instakill spell than any other instakill spell, and the aoe is janky enough that unlike death ring it is surprisingly hard to get more than one instakill (and even on potd when i can have more than one instakill by the time cast time completes i might have already killed one of the other targets). so making it more reactive and worthwhile to use an instakill spell for just an expected value of 1 target will help a lot i think.

is boil their flesh an instakill spell with an ok failure mode, or a damage spell that can also instakill? right now it's mediocre at both. i think i would prefer it to be an instakill spell with an ok failure mode, which means i would prefer to have a fast cast time like that, but not really worry about buffing the raw damage (maybe the corrode damage).

hey, as someone who used the corpse explosion invocation alot, i think you're understating how good the ability is. just give it an auto-hit on the corpse and the rest will take care of itself. it has huge aoe (way better than thrice), better overall damage than thrice (so long as you're targeting a corpse you have a decent chance to hit), and can be upgraded to provide a very long debuff. on potd, in which i used the corpse invocation to good effect, having to roll to hit the corpse acted like a damage nerf, e.g. a 75% chance to hit is effectively the same as a -25% multiplicative damage debuff. making it autohit essentially automatically buffs the damage (e.g. in this case +33%).

i think the main downside is that you will always have the forbidden fist curse on yourself for a full round regardless of how good your resolve or low your intellect. on the plus side, i think the +50% hostile debuff bonus on enfeebled will make it really easy to hit critical rounding thresholds.

i think @Kaylonor some such with more solo experience is a better person to answer. in my experience, megabosses are highly technical fights. so "tanking" in the general sense does not make sense to me. you can certainly tank with like a salvation-of-time/barring-deaths-door combo, but it's not exactly the same kind of tanking you'd do in the rest of the game. put another way - with the right setup you don't even need a tank at all (whispers of the wind + ajamuuts' stalking cloak will absolutely wreck hauane o whe). they're just all super technical puzzles rather than conventional fights.

somewhat of a trick question, because deflection won't help you beat all the megabosses. hauane o whe is immortal if you can't disintegrate or cc/dps enough. sigilmaster auranic can cleanse your buffs and one of the totems unerringly hits you (no attack roll). you also face a lot of dangerous dlc and megaboss attacks that don't target deflection. i'm sure potd solo experts can chime in more, but i don't think deflection is the end-all be-all here. but i think on potd accuracy tops out at around 150. if you can get to a deflection of 225, you're all but guaranteed to be safe (from physical attacks). it looks like it's doable, but in practice i don't think there's any persistent way to keep a deflection that high.

you're right. i originally had hatchet in there, but i forgot that conqueror stance is active and changed the hatchet to be a dagger. i'll edit the post. it's not meant to be a super optimized, just the best i could do in a few minutes.

i haven't really tied to max out deflection before, but if you're ignoring magic possibly a human/orlan fighter/paladin gets you up there. d = deflection, a = all defenses, r = resolve 22 base + 10r (20 starting resolve) + 3d * 19 level + 15a deep faith + 5d superior deflection + 22d mythic large shield + 6d weaponandshield style + 10d conqueror stance <50% health (active) + 10?d casita samelia's legacy + 2d ring of minor deflection + 2d*n entonia signet ring + 7d cloak of greater deflection + 20a refreshing defense (active) + 5r some resolve inspiration (active) + 2r token of faith + 3d hatchet + 1r shorewalker sandals + 1r alchemy bonus [northwest world map] = 198 + 2 * engaging enemies edit - Note: only a mainchar or custom paladin can get up to +15 deep faith. OBS-created npcs don't have any alignments so don't get any rep benefits to deep faith (or spiritual weapon or holy radiance). edit 2 - added some more stuff and some annotations edit 3 - reverted back to hatchet. note - this is not meant to be the absolute best answer, just something i threw together as food for thought. one could probably do better.

off the top of my head: Deflection bonuses paladin deep faith: up to +15 fighter: +5 innate, only +2 for multiclass fighter superior deflection: +5 fighter conqueror stance: +10 (active) barbarian: -5 innate, only -3 for multiclass large shield: up to +22 (+12 +mythic 10) weapon and shield style: +6 wizard's double: +40 (active) dagger modal: +10 (active) qstaff modal: +20 (active) mirror image: up to +30 (active) llengrath's: +10 (active) arcane veil: +50 (active, veil-pierce vulnerable) escape: +50 (active) casita samelia's legacy (chest): +5 plus +.25 per intimidate (so probably typically up to +11 max) ring of minor deflection (ring): +2 cloak of deflection (back): +4 cloak of greater deflection (back): +7 entonia signet ring (ring): +2 per engaging foe stalker subclass bonus: +5 near animal companion edit - hatchet: +3 vs melee per hatchet Deflection via resolve bonuses inspiration: +5 (active) natural resolve plus background: +9 human/orlan: additional +1 cloak of poverty (back): up to +5 token of faith (neck): +2 Deflection via all defense bonus druid stag spiritshift: +7 moonwell: +10 (active) circle of protection: +15 (active) symbol of eothas: +15 (active) fighter vigorous/refreshing defense: +20 (active) beast's claw: up to +20 (active) edit - llengrath's safeguard: +15 when activated (active)

i did this with whispers of the wind post-5.0 and ajamuut's works just fine with that. is WotW just implemented differently?

IIRC there are four "tracks" of rewards in SSS after critical story points. In no particular order: empowering your spirit friend getting an item to let you upgrade to legendary returning souls to the island doing something else to the souls the first three you can "stack" up to four times (four empowers, four item upgrades, up to +8 galawain bonus IIRC), whereas i think the fourth one is a little weirder. ISTR that i tried to do something with the souls the first time once and i couldn't and had to choose one of the others. i don't evne know how you get rymrgand's gift (never gotten it).

i almost always play vanilla. as for Insect Swarm, that exist solely to give something to the druid at tier two casting, which is why it's marked optional. Outside of beast fights, at level 7+ you basically have a tier two spell cast that's not used for anything (since aside from hold beasts you only have woodskin which is not exactly something you always need to double-up on). Insect Swarm has good utility (blocking concentration) and benefits from the ancient's +1 PL, so I picked it up. To be honest, the only time I've ever played solo is for the ultimate, so I have no idea. I suspect it would be pretty decent, at least early on, simply because sporelings are really good assists and when resting in the wild mare to get +1 tier one casts you get up to 5x summons (three at first, self-empower for two more) which will basically let you facetank most early-mid game fights. I'm not so sure in late game though if there's enough damage or sustain to survive solo, at least until least unstable coil arrives on the scene.

i tried calculating this but there are so many moving parts that I think it is very hard to say. I would say just go for whatever playstyle you prefer; if you're not going to use the pet, rogue is probably better choice.

sorry i can't answer the tb-question, but it is always worth summoning the pet. it's a significant amount of DPS that the ranger needs to have, because that's how the ranger is balanced. (much like a rogue is balanced around having sneak attack damage, a ranger is balanced around having a persistent friend doing damage.) the cost of summoning the pet is meant to balance out the fact that you no longer suffer from bonded grief.

i am purely speculating, but i strongly suspect that because obsidian is owned by microsoft now, they are going to be an xbox game pass exclusive shop as much as possible (barring past publishing deals they have to honor, like with poe1).