thelee

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

so there's a few things. 1. combusting wounds is an applyovertime effect IIRC. that means that what it does is actually wrong compared to the tooltip. basically it does 2 damage per tick, including an additional 2 damage upon initial application. (all applyovertime effects understate their damage because of this initial application being excluded from the tooltip) 2. combusting wounds stacks, so that you can get multiple ticks. the only limit is essentially the number of times you can manage to stack it within a given duration. 3. the way stacking DoTs appear to work is that it's essentially treated as one DoT, so all the damage is summed together and ticks as one. 3b. that includes the initial application. 4. unlike some other stacking buffs, I do not believe DoTs (or HoTs for that matter) track their expiration times separately. When you apply a new stack, it refreshes the duration and adds a new stack. tested just now, this is wrong, expiration times are tracked separately. fassina in this case had tier seven spells. that means +5 PL on combusting wounds. Had +1 PL from having the conjurer summon out, for +6 total. I believe combusting wounds damage gets +10% damage per PL. It also scales with might, but that's relatively irrelevant due to how buggily it is implemented with ApplyOverTime effects. So by default, each tick will do 3.2 damage per tick, including upon initial application. (edit: testing just now, the tooltip suggests it only gets +5% per PL, but it doesn't square with the actual per tick damage numbers i get in testing. so either the tooltip is somehow wrong, or there's something odd about how PL bonuses are determined for applyovertime effects.) normally what keeps combusting wounds from going out of control is that you're not constantly bombarding the enemy with damage effects, each tick has low duration, the master debuff that generates the stacking dots doesn't last very long, and it has relatively low PEN. However, with the shield cracks and passive flanking I was able to get the Beast of Winter (using them as an example because I remember it most clearly) down to ~7 fire AR iirc, which is more than enough for a +6 PL combusting wounds to do full pen. Fassina also had infuse with vital essence for 20 intellect plus a couple from items. In addition, the resolve penalty and overall defense lowering i accomplished meant the initial combusting wounds crit on rymrgand for something like 40s with each DoT at around ~12s, plenty of time to build up stacks under dedicated focus. the last time I examined the tooltips in detail, between wicked briars (three of them, two from the theurge, one from xoti), malignant cloud, wall of force, an animal companion, come come chant, single-minded focus fire from my entire party (i let the adds in that fight just get consumed by incidental hits from the aoe) i had 21 stacks of combusting wounds. And that literally meant everytime I saw a red number tick on top of rymrgand from any one of my many damage sources, right behind it was another number for 70+ damage (in fact I only examined the tooltip closely because rymrgand was dying much faster than expected, and that took a while because rymrgand had so many debuffs that it was hard to actually see the stackc ount), and that number kept climbing up with each tick until rymrgand basically disintegrated before combusting wounds could even run out. i don't remember the specific stack count and situation for neriscyrlas, but i was seeing 100+ damage number ticks rapidly near the end (and remember, these aren't the every 3 s ticks, these are the numbers you see every time any other damage effect happens on ner so it's happening very rapidly). based on the other numbers, i can infer that it got up to the 30+ stack count between everything that was happening . it was so shockingly fast neriscyrlas's AI script didn't even have time to ready its cast of llengrath's safeguard (which I had been preparing interrupts for) before she died. if you *really* want to exploit this, combine scordeo's edge and the best axe you can find. trigger blade cascade, salvation of time it a bit (don't even have to do brilliant tricks), switch to your axe, and just go to town. *each* time you swing your axe with no recovery, you will 10% of your weapon damage as raw, plus all the other stacks' worth of damage. I melted dorudugan in no time whatsoever, even with severe underpenetration. note however that the game really does not like this - when stacking gets this extreme weird stuff happens at end-of-combat cleanup. i will see characters getting healed for an overflowed amount of health (e.g. 2 billion or 2^32) at end of combat, or they might even take an overflowed amount of damage (-2 billion). in my blade cascade + bleeding axe situation, i actually crashed the game the first time I did this on dorudugan after it died. (the beast of winter situation didn't do anythign too weird so that was probably a safe stacking range, but definitely at neriscyrlas i saw my characters getting healed for 2 billion as i switched into the scripted encounter after her defeat and i was worried from prior experience that i might have jsut crashed my game) edit: this is also why unbending on a fighter can be extremely good, because the same applies to heals except in reverse. I first discovered this behavior a short while back (and I think Elric Galad helped explain/research it) actually when in an SSS arena fight an enemey fighter with unbending was healing for something like 100+ health *every time I hit it*. it went from near death to unharmed in a blink of an eye. be real careful around unbending and try to wait it out instead, or use something like arcane suppression or tranquilizer shot or street sweeper to get rid of it.

just to add, even for non-casters helm of the white void can be very good and is worth a check for anyone's setup. rogue abilities should generously benefit from it, for example. mule kick (but not knockdown) and charge on fighter also benefit. while i haven't tested this one in particular, even barbarian should benefit once they have spirit frenzy. however OBS programmed the item, it's just generously in the player's favor and so long as the ability in question has a mind/body affliction at any point, the entire thing gets a +10 accuracy bonus.

what's your system? graphics settings? is there anything in particular happening that corresponds to those fps dips? some spell effects are generated so inefficiently (possibly requiring a disk I/O read or something) that they will always cause fps hits for me: mirror image is the biggest culprit here for me. there's also a subtle memory leak - if you reload the game in the middle of combat (e.g. if events take a wrong turn), some things don't get properly flushed out of memory in the game engine, so the more you do this, the lower your overall frame rate, ESPECIALLY in combat. you can solve this by periodically quitting to the game menu and loading a game that way, instead of reloading a game directly from within an existing game. (historical note: i believe this was also responsible for some terribly amusing bugs in the past, such as implosion charge playing its suction sound on loop over and over even through game reloads, or ship morale going up or down by ginormous amounts because the game forgot to reset your ship combat attempts if you reload in the middle of a ship fight)