thelee

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).

to be clear, rymrgand is about entropy and decay, not destruction: thematically it seems to be all plugged into the (real-life) theory of the heat death of the universe. to that end, fire seems very counter to that - fire is thematically is linked to industry and creation (this theme is stronger in poe1 with abydon and magran), whereas ice is more thematically linked into everything slowly getting to a point where no more work can ever be done again. while his portfolio doesn't explicitly exclude fire, it's not a coincidence that basically everything related to rymrgand in both poe1 and poe2 and in the supplemental lore is always about ice, cold, and winter.

I deliberately chose not to pick it up simply because I was trying to go for something different (i got a little bored of always equipping it on tekehu) but for those with less desire to be a contrarian, lance of the midwood stag would be extremely good for this build for precisely those reasons. later on you could start with weyc's wand (empower) and then switch to lance of midwood stag for the rest of the fight for a total of +5 PL. earlier in the game i tend to be pretty aggressive with poison use. later in the game, it's much more targeted and deliberate because of action economy - because of wael's challenge i had to just come up with some vague heuristics on targeting, so i would generally start trying to hit an important caster or two with poison after the initial round of buffs. if i have advance warning for a fight (stealth) i would either load up on an initial poison to do after a halt, or (if there are no good halt targets) i would just start the fight attacking with poison (landing a confuse poison on a healer type can be pretty effective). as reminder note IIRC, poison only gets half your alchemy skill towards its PL scaling. Direct poison bonuses or generic PL scaling are therefore worth 2x (so litany of the spirit is effectively worth +2 alchemy PL, not +1; spider silk is worth a whopping +4). (again i just kinda winged it in-game because of wael's challenge)

If you've followed my postings on this forum, you probably know that I play priests a lot, and have been trying to find a way to play basically every priest subclass and multiclass option. Universalist has been really hard for me to square up into a good satisfying option, but I finally had a breakthrough while watching some WarCraft 3 streams. A keeper of the grove! While this build isn't the most powerful or synergistic universalist you could build, I found it to be quite a bit of fun and can really carry you in the early-mid game due to the strength of its summons and buffs (which is also arguably some of the hardest parts of the game). Plus, in the process of building/playing this build, I developed a newfound appreciation for Halt. Basic build outline: stats Wood Elf, 12 might/8 con/15 dex/17 perception/18+1 intellect (old vailia)/7 resolve. Classes: ancient [cat spiritshift] + wael Skills: Alchemy and History Level-by-level guide (with free spells in brackets, optional picks with asterisk): [Summon Sporelings] Tanglefoot | Halt [Arcane Veil] Fast Runner Restore [Charm Beasts] Woodskin | Two weapon style [Iconic Projection] Wildstrike - Corrode* One-handed style [Wild Growth] Nature's Balm | Prayer for the Spirit [Mirror Image] Insect Swarm* Combat Focus* [Form of the Delemgan] Moonwell | Devotions for the Faithful* [Llengrath's] Greater Wildstrike - Corrode* Spell Shaping [Wall of Thorns] Nature's Terror* | Litany for the Spirit [Confusion] Champion's Boon Rapid Casting [Venombloom] Rot Skulls | Salvation of Time [Arkemyr's] Tough* Quick Summoning* [Call to the Primordial] Nature's Bounty* | Accurate Empower [Gaze] Lasting Empower Gear Weapon slot 1: Weyc's Wand (bound to not-priest) Weapon slot 2: Eye of Wael Weapon slot 3 (see below): a hand mortar or club Armor: Changeling's Mantle or Spider Silk Robe Other items: Giftbearer's Cloth (will grant you a weapon slot), Mask of the Grotto Deep How the build plays Summon Sporelings is a unique ancient summon that gives you two little allies and is available to you at tier 1. However, despite being a tier 1 spell, the sporelings themselves are themselves minimum level 6. That means in the early game, the sporelings are extremely tanky even by PotD standards, and even after the early game (when their offense fails to keep up with enemy scaling) their health/level gain is so significant that they can still soak up a lot of damage. Halt is also an extremely effective spell throughout the game - it has good range and super fast cast, so the trick is to cast it on a melee-only foe as part of the opening moments in combat (or directly out of stealth). You've essentially hard-CC-ed an enemy for a significant amount of time (15s + intellect + PL scaling). Directly out of stealth is preferable - because an attack out of stealth has a -85% recovery time bonus, if your first Halt whiffs you can try again almost instantly. So early-mid game, the Keeper plays like, well, a Keeper of the Grove from WC3: keep one tough melee enemy out of the fight using Halt, and then tank a bunch of other enemies using Sporelings. Use druid and priest magic to keep everyone alive, resummoning your Sporelings if needed. This is good enough that you can be carried through fights that you might have struggled with before and have no business of winning. For example, the Sealed Fate ambush by Talfor at level 6 on PotD can be rough if you take the violent approach - the enemies are triple-skulled with two dangerous wizard and a priest casting mid-level magic. I was able to clear it without a single knockout using OBS party members, with Wael's challenge enabled, carried solely on the backs of the basic early game toolkit this universalist has. As you progress into the game and get more spells than you know what to do with, a secondary focus emerges on poison, spiritshifting, and healing. A high intellect (from prayer and litany of the spirit) will help extend your spiritshift duration, and cat form gives you the best offensive punch thanks to its once/encounter +33% action speed ability. Arcane Veil and Mirror Image are good fast effects to make your spiritshifting a bit safer. Salvation of Time eventually comes along to boost spiritshift and the +33% action speed duration. The poison boost comes in the form of Venombloom (which benefits from +poison PL), Mask of the Deep Grotto, and single-wielding ranged weapons that you can use to deliver poison more effectively. (Single-weapon style doesn't boost poison accuracy, but because poison requires you to land a hit/graze first, it becomes a beneficiary of it. Very similar to how perception/accuracy is very important for a barbarian because Carnage is a dependent event of hitting a target as opposed to an independent event that happens regardless. This is also why you pick up Devotions for the Faithful.) Rot skulls aren't poison per se, but does great damage coupled with single-weapon style to land those initial hits, and interspersing it with spellcasting is a good complement to the build (since the DoTs from rot skulls don't stack). In the end-game you have several options. Accurate/Lasting Empower exist so that if you want you can take the Least Unstable Coil route and empower Venombloom - each tick of Venombloom will grant you another tier 3 inspiration from Least Unstable Coil, while also triggering Weyc's Wand's +3 PL bonus, all of which you can extend (along with spiritshift and the +33% action speed boost) with Salvation of Time. Sporelings are still effective bullet sponges, but now you can also use Call to the Primordials for a bunch of tanks with a bit more offense (though still subject to PEN/AR issues). A steady diet of poisons combined with various PL boosts (Litany, Mask of the Grotto Deep, Spider Silk Robe) will make you good at fire-and-forgetting foes of various kinds (generally casters, but a couple poisons don't target fortitude and are great for tankier foes). All the while you have the general defensive utility of the priest and druid to keep your entire party alive. Don't neglect Woodskin and Form of the Delemgan as buffs! They can offer serious survival boosts due to their very generous (if specific) AR boosts (remember: many ranged weapons are piercing). Halt is always good, and it'll only get better as your accuracy goes up and PL scaling becomes more generous. Be careful though - some melee enemies have ranged weapons as backup. But in general, the utility of Halt has been so suprisingly good that I now also weight the ranger's similar Binding/Thorny Roots much higher (though modulated by the fact that it comes much later). Possible party members and notes If you want to stay in-theme, I recommend picking up a ranger to come along for the fun. Note - I recently discovered that if you set your party AI to "passive" you won't encounter the consumable AI bug. You have to manually tell your party members to attack, but once they're attacking they'll do scripts and auto-attacks as normal (you only need to explicitly tell them to attack when their target(s) are gone or you have told them to stop doing something). I recommend using this with the keeper or else your constant diet of alchemy/poison can get tedious with flipping the AI on/off.

<putting on my best boeroer impression> whispers has an upgrade that lets you get free attacks if enemies miss against you. that already is pretty good. a fighter with its innately higher deflection, in conqueror stance, with superior deflection, and good resolve and gear could already get you into decent enemy-miss range. if you multiclass with wael/wizard/trickster you could cast some spells to spike up your deflection even higher. whispers also interacts specially with clear out. Every single enemy in clear out range triggers a whispers attack... and because whispers itself has an aoe, that means you could have multiple overlapping attacks. this effect is a bit easier with a forced-melee aoe blunderbuss (you have to equip a bashing shield iirc to force blunderbuss to being used in clear out), and works best if you do one of the clear out upgrades to maximize how many enemies you get an aoe attack with. other great swords i've used to good effect in the past: sanguine great sword with good crits (lots of sustain) twin eels (lots of sustain as well, bonus crits, but needs lots of religion) voidwheel (the necrotic lance benefits from weapon bonuses, lash damage is always good)

fighter gets a couple of stuns (charge and power/inspired strike). are you mostly worried about the cast delay for spell-based stuns?

there are actually lots of notable greatswords - perhaps you are confusing it with estocs? In fact, it's only a matter of time before we say "great sword" enough that we summon @Boeroerto talk about Whispers of the Endless Paths in particular, which has tons of great potential (especially with clear out IIRC).

that was only partially the problem. the big problem is that in real-time with pause, grazing and getting like a 1s stun duration isn't terribly broken when it happens like every 6 seconds. with turn-based mode, all those gets rounded to getting a 1 round stun duration for bolts that happen every round, even on a low-intellect, weak graze against high-resolve enemies (if you had even a .1s stun, that would get rounded up to one round). that is why the nerf made is so that you only stun on a crit, and you get a dazed otherwise. it makes it much harder to stunlock that way.

no build ideas here from me, but i would just say that a great-sword-wielding devoted fighter is probably right up your alley. Devoted subclass mitigates the greatsword's greatest weakness (low PEN) and fighter has a ton of useful utility for martial combat. A single-classed devoted would get you some really powerful effects later on (clear out and friends, inspired strike).

Hey @Boeroer, are you still updating this? I noticed there are some newer builds not on here (like mine ) and maybe it's about time to at least hide away the really old builds behind a spoiler tag or something.

because of the way rounding works, once the first blast of lightning bolts go off, every enemy hit gets auto-targeted and stunned for 1 round (no partial rounds) for like the next 3+ rounds, and in this case IIRC the rounds last until the start of your next turn, at which point a new blast of lightning gets triggered. Because of the expanded graze range in turn-based mode, pretty much you are guaranteed to hit enemies with it, even on PoTD. And again, remember that there's no partial rounds, so even a graze on a tiny stun duration would still last a full round. Combined, relentless storm basically stunlocks enemies out for the fight and basically enemies had a single window of opportunity to interrupt your druid before the first round of bolts were released. The nerf was necessary because otherwise every druid with relentless storm could trivialize all non-might-resistant encounters. Now, a crit-build can still kind of partially do it, but it's not a trivial thing.

another thing to keep in mind is that on potd especially combat can be long even considering some of the tweaks to turn-based mode. in P:K hard/unfair, even in real-time, initiative can matter a crap ton because both the snow-balling effects of flat-footedness and sneak damage, but also because a typical fight might be decided in the first two rounds or so. (seriously, i have sometimes just save-scummed for good initiative rolls on my party members to get through a tough fight, something i never thought i would do in a RTwP game.) in deadfire, outside of port maje, combat on potd can take quite a while iirc (i haven't done too much tb). so even getting some CC in first may have its impact diminished significantly (again, charm/dominate effects would snowball in a way that other CC could not).

dazed is still a very good CC effect because of the PEN penalty. the nerf didn't break relentless storm, it fixed it from breaking turn-based mode. also war caller vs swashbuckler are very different apples/oranges comparisons

there's definitely a snow-balling effect that you can trigger with extremely good initiative, but i could probably count on one or two hands those abilities (mostly charm/dominate effects). and while it can be useful for casters to get their abilities off sooner, the overall risk of interruption and such is lower in turn-based - the turn-based action economy also constrains how eagerly enemies can interrupt, and narrows the window they can do so. compare that subtle effect to the very real effect of dumping your stat points into stats and armor, both with more direct effects on combat outcomes, and aside from a narrow window of charm/dominate effects, i think it can easily be argued that dexterity/recovery loses its importance. keep in mind you can also initiate combat yourself in most cases using stealth. while not every ability or item can be used in stealth, this essentially means you already get a good first round regardless of dex/armor in a manner of speaking. heck, i believe some charm effects are usable outside of combat (at least debonaire is), so even from the "snow-balling effect" perspective dexterity might not be as important. edit - to be fair, i don't think there are very many turn-based "experts" out there. we could all be wrong and who knows maybe there is a killer high-dex approach to potd tb combat.

dual wielding is still decent (especially just for doubling-up on stat sticks), it's just not the all-around best approach as in real time.

yeah, after SSS/FS you can come back and roflstomp nemnok/the shimmering isles/the final act, and even try your hand at the megabosses. that's pretty much how i route my party (unless i need something specific from nemnok or the fampyrs) so I can play around with some of the shiny treasures you get late.

in real time mode they are actually pretty great for locking down bosses and casters, though you have to micromanage the shooting a bit. i haven't tried them in turn-based mode, but I imagine that they would be better at damage and worse at interrupting. The action economy constraint on their firing would be gone, but at the same time it seems like it would be harder to optimize your firing to interrupt or bosses. If you don't care about that, then just use them for the higher damage rate.

both SSS and FS are late-game DLCs. You can do SSS earlier, but I know people here have complained in the past about the difficulty spike when playing sub-level-19 parties. If you're interested in just getting some gear, you can try it earlier and just bail on doing the final few fights. FS is definitely end-game DLC. You can try to do it earlier (level 18 or so), but I'm pretty sure it's just straight-up targeting level 20 parties. Even at level 20 with a pretty-OK party it can be rather brutal on PotD. There's a lot of good gear, but "bee-lining" towards them might not be feasible. In SSS, Least Unstable Coil and the special soulbound axe are good picks. There's also a great xbow/arbalest (forget which). In FS, all of the weyc's gear is pretty good, but it pretty much requires you to do the entire DLC to get them all.