thelee

lol, i just recently ran into this and panicked pretty serverely because it was a pretty long fight. fortunately switching grimoires again restores all the missing the spells. i'm skeptical on the idea of buffing citzal's. i think in a vacuum (e.g. if you just plopped it onto a cipher or chanter ability tree maybe) citzal's is on the underpowered side for a tier nine spell, but it works pretty well as part of a wizard package (minoletta's piercing sigil, ironskin, arcane reflection [being in punching range makes it more likely casters toss spells directly at you], self-empower to cast cloak of death as well, either of the phantoms, etc.). i think at most bumping them up to be fixed at spawning at mythical might be OK. as it stands though, i generally like how most of the wizard conjured gear remains competitive throughout the game, filling different niches, and already as it is citzal's has an edge, only counter-balanced by the fact that it eats up a tier nine spell cast. push it too far and i wouldn't want to use anything else, which maybe some folks are fine with for a tier nine spell, but is not quite my tastes.

you know, if any thing, the effect is subtle and uncontrollable enough that upgrading it is kind of a trap. i actually liked to use finality's claim on occasion, especially against hauane o whe (it has a chance to reflect hauane's acid attacks). but adding a double-edged sword kind of makes it a bit less "safe" to use. oh well

never mind again - it DOES affect allies. i think i needed a save/load cycle for the game to properly initiate the aura in combat. edit: the description says the aura only activates when engaged, and my original test subject (bekarna) had no engagement, so it didn't trigger the aura. it's unfortunate it affects allies, but the aura range is so small (1.5m) in practice it's pretty easy to keep allies out and have it only affect engaging enemies.

never mind - it *DOES* affect enemies. it's just smart enough to remember that bekarna was not originally hostile to me, so it didn't affect her when i force-attacked her. sorry bekarna

upon testing - it doesn't appear to affect allies. bad news: i'm not sure if it affects enemies, either. there's no combat tooltip indication for this aura and -7% when time dilation is maxed out is very hard to measure on a casual level. maybe someone more skilled at looking at this stuff can verify if it's scripted correctly? *hint hint*

Did you know you can upgrade Finality's Claim? I didn't. For the first time ever, I noticed a "combine shards" button at the bottom of the tooltip. It gathers void shards that you pick up in BoW (always wondered what those did). All three, and I got a Time Dilation III aura attached to the ring, which slows action speed of all nearby by -7%. Not great, but not bad for a surprise upgrade. Just leaving this note here in case you, like me, foolishly missed an obvious button. It's not documented by the wiki, so I figured it couldn't be that well known.

in addition, the listed PEN understates it because spells/abilities that are higher up get an innate "ability level" bonus that is more generous than PL scaling, +.5 PEN per ability tier (and +2 accuracy per ability tier) a tier five PEN 7 spell will inherently start off at PEN 9 and +4 accuracy. innate PEN 7 is not great, but keep in mind that a higher PEN is not necessarily better because the game is balanced such that higher PEN spells tend to do lower damage (iirc many cipher/druid spells off the top of my head are PEN 9+ and low damage). btw, champion's boon is A+ precisely for the +2 PEN that you can toss around to anyone who needs it (whereas monk limits their tenacious to themselves). it's useful on almost anyone you want to deal damage with on PotD.

enfeebled is treated almost identically as if you had +10 additional intellect, applied immediately, so it's additive with int. also an intriguing option!

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)