thelee

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.

note to any interested - i updated the build a tiny bit with some tweaks based on end-game play. basically this build is constrained by action economy a lot, because everything you want to cast is slow and you have so much you want to drop. so i recommend ditching ring of focused flame in late game for kauru's prize (you'll be using less and less fire-keyworded stuff due to action economy and cinder bombs will still be getting +10 from helm), and possibly ditching magnificent escape cape in exchange for shroud of the phantasm and a source of mind inspiration (party member buff - cipher, priest, paladin, another chanter would do it. empowered venombloom with least unstable coil is close to guaranteed to getting you one. communal carnage will get you one, with some ramp up time). also while i flagged nature's terror as an optional pick because of the skill-intensiveness of using it right, it really is a GOAT in this build. club modal, flail modal basically lets you repeatedly crit and interrupt all the time even on tough foes, and nature's terror lasts a super long time and doesn't run into targeting issues with poison-immune or ground-immune enemies. (as always, it works even better if it's overlapping with cinder bombs/venombloom/wicked briars/even tanglefoot) embrace the earth talon also remain immensely useful to increase crit rate to supercharge the skald side of things when needed. also should add as a synergy - blind/disorient afflictions. you already get some blind with cinder bombs, but you really should try to get some more from party support. the way interrupts work is that they add a +2s delay but is capped by the target's current recovery with a minimum of 2s, which could in fact be the main recovery if you've interrupted an action or you're against a particularly fast enemy. blinded lifts that minimum to 3s, which doesn't sound like a lot but in practice is a significant increased window of delay time for further interrupts. on foes with slower actions, blinded can lift the cap so much that they may never get an action again due how large a recovery window they have to get further interrupts (and you'll be dropping a lot on them, potentially).

do you have PL scaling? my quick math suggests you'd need a total of +7 PL to get pushed over the threshold with 20 intellect. if you can buff intellect anyway (infuse with vital essence?) you can get away with less +PL (a a reminder, for each ability tier that you've unlocked that is higher than the one the spell is on gives you +1 PL. so having access to tier 7 spells is +5 PL right there.)

hey while doing some AI scripting I noticed some issues in vanilla: the AI doesn't recognize kalakoth's minor blights or arkemyr's enchanted armory as "summoned weapons" which leads to some scripting troubles. is this something that can easily be fixed by a missing keyword or something?

the splintered reef one you might be thinking of a campsite on the black isles. i think you only get one from the kraken (all of the upgrade mat loot drops from bosses got nerfed). you also get one from FS - either from the mysterious dragon skeleton or somewhere else.

old city is unique like that. all other places just have slog zones or traps.

just... avoid the corpses? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

wow, good find. i guess it just shows how low on the totem pole this ability was that it went unnoticed at large until now. do you know if this applies to things that aren't abilities? like scrolls, poisons, or bombs? does it show up in the tooltip?

i was only selecting "persistent" effects, not stuff you have to actively cast and maintain. but yes, much higher should be possible with salvation of time + escape. +all defense effects will also improve your deflection and because it's not a "deflection bonus" it stacks with a deflection bonus. so escape + circle of protection/symbol of eothas/refreshing defense/moonwell/beast's claw will get you even higher

hoo boy i waste too much money on ship stuff 😄

the odds are very very low for low amounts of money, and you don't really get a chance to get 50+ k until relatively late. also, IME people are terrible with evaluating random events in games

hm, you would need to make sure to exceed the terribly unfavorable rounding cutoff here. with some PL scaling and high intellect the damage dots just *barely* get over the cutoff to get to two rounds duration. you would have to somehow get 20-40 damage attacks in within two rounds, which seems challenging (though all the hazard and persistent effects would tick twice each round iirc). this is where the action economy issues of turn-based hurt alot. it only really works in RTwP because some actions are extremely fast (dual wielded full attacks - you could squeeze in two of those in the "time" it takes for turn-based to handle one dual-wielded full attack). but let's see, based on some back-of-the-envelope-math and my recollection of the rymrgand fight: over ~12s combusting wounds Dot (2 rounds): 12 triggers from 3x wicked briars 4 triggers of malignant cloud 4 triggers of wall of force (i think hazard walls trigger more often, but i'm low-balling it here) 6 each hit from three dual-wielded party members making two rounds of attacks 4 hits from two non-dual-wielded party members making two rounds of attacks that would get you to 30 stacks by the final attack, so it looks doable. with more effects (cinder bombs and such) you could get higher. in fact, given this, and the fact that in my RtWP fight i was using full attacks and fast weapons with a couple of my melee fighters (which basically doubles+ the hit count in the same duration) and had an essential phantom and an animal companion, i'm surprised my persistent stack count against rymrgand didn't get even higher. i guess he died too quickly 😄 HOWEVER, if you're just missing even a slight bit of intellect or PL scaling or the enemy's resolve is too high, you only get one round of combusting wounds DoT and it would get much harder to meaningfully stack up