thelee

Update:

one of my very early builds with a berathian + ghost heart itinerant. A priest of berath gets a lot of extra DoTs, which synergizes with ranger's predator's sense. (flavor-wise it seems to work pretty well to have a "ghost pet" as a priest of berath) since then, the ranger part has gotten better with new abilities and balance changes, and we recently figured out that takedown combo (from ranger) will boost DoT damage, so long as the combo happens after the DoT lands, and the berathian, in addition to having lots of DoTs, also has Cleansing Flame, which is a short-duration-high-damage DoT that would benefit a lot from takedown combo.

Yeah, this is the reason why even effects that trigger all the time nevertheless has a description that is "chance of X" or, if they were feeling bold, "high chance of X". Who knows if in some balance patch they need to knock it down from 100% to 80% without needing to an entire localization pass. (I was recently privy to some budget details of a (non-game) translation effort needed for a tech project also based in California and even for one language on a small scale it was literally thousands of dollars. So yeah, translations don't come cheap.)

consider playing as a paladin order or a priest subclass that has favored dispositions that forces you into things you might not normally do. bleakwalker, steel garrote, skaen, and woedica, for example, both have cruel as a favored disposition. (bleakwalkers also have aggressive, for extra "fun" - you might end up getting into lots of extra fights). start from there and do a build-around in terms of race and background. i focused on cruel because cruel path is probably under-explored by most players, and being forced to be cruel for gameplay purposes leads to some interesting new outcomes.

I think if the game designers were willing to be a bit less "systematic" they could front-load the weapon proficiencies a bit more earlier on, maybe like 1-3-6-9 and then that's it. Picking up a weapon proficiency at level 16 or 20 is virtually pointless, because by then you probably already have figured out what weapons your characters are using, and you've probably already seen most of the content in the game. Also, count me in the club that was disappointed early on to learn about how stacking rules mean that the +2 PEN from modals doesn't stack with with Tenacious/Energized or the Potion of Piercing Strikes, as well as dagger's +10 deflection for defensive magic. It makes the Mace's -1 AR modal and wand/hatchet's -10 accuracy a bit better by comparison. Though in general, I rarely have enough coverage of Tenacious/Energized/Piercing Strikes to make those modals completely redundant.

do you have AI on aloth enabled? maybe an AI script is bad.

do you have some other effect that is causing damage to aloth? one of the effects of that weapon is that spell hits have a chance to charm their target. if there's some weird (spell) effect on aloth that is causing that damage, it could also charm him (though it should also be turning him into a pig).

wow, I've only ever recruited wizards from pubs or as companions (fassina or aloth), so I've never noticed arcane assault before. It can't be completely new - the upgrade to "Called to his bidding, the ancient instruments of death" gives you an extra animated weapon that has arcane assault as its unique ability. I just thought it was an ability unique to chanter (ironically, given its role in poe1). not to be self-aggrandizing but i thought my list was pretty complete (aside from arcane assault). there's also Maura's Infested Grimoire lvl 7, conjuration - Maura's Grasping Tentacle

"Belranga has too high defenses, so will prevail against anything else than Hauni O Whe. Unless of course if her minions are spawned too." Without minions, Hauani O Whe runs away with the fight, eventually. Belranga might be able to CC the first form, but Belranga won't be able to CC multiple oozes spread out. With minions, I think it's actually a toss-up. Belranga will literally kill herself in such a situation (in some of my practice ultimate runs this is basically what happens), but lots of spiderlings = lots of attempts at petrify, resisted down to paralyze. You might be able to keep the various forms cc-ed enough at Greater/Massive, and at Greater ooze and below the spider and spiderlings can rip them to shreds easily. The only complication is that HoW would be tossing symbiotes everywhere, but I actually think the random aoe attacks of the spiders/spiderlings would be killing the spider/spiderlings before they can do much moving around to spawn more oozes. Dorudugan is also weak to corrode, which coincidentally is hauani o whe's specialty. While Dorudugan can do a lot of damage and in a huge area, in practice the numbers from the explosions are only in the hundreds of damage. Dorudgan can stunlock Hauani o Whe pre-split, but after that, I think the fight pretty much steadily runs away from Dorudugan in favor of the ooze. The AI would have to be smart enough to position Dorudugan to interrupt all the oozes with each swipe, which it won't be. Depending on how Belranga's consume ability is implemented, I think Belranga could beat Dorudugan. Given enough dead spiderlings, Belranga will be extremely fast and have a really powerful consume effect - in a practice ultimate run the fight ended up becoming impossible because Belranga was healing so much health from each consume, and even with immunity to interrupts Belranga's consume ability still knocks you down for several interminable seconds. (Fun fact: because of how this practice run ended up going, I actually counted the number of spider/lings killed in my real run to make sure I didn't wait too long to really press the offense against Belranga.) If Belranga is able to knock Dorudugan down (I think this is possible; I seem to recall using a knock up ability on Dorudugan during the early days of megabosses) and effectively use consume, eventually the fight against Belranga will become impossible for Dorudugan to surmount.

can you have one megaboss join your team and just hide your actual party somewhere? anyway, my money's on hauani o whe stomping on every other boss.

yeah that sounds about right - depending on how the trinket is implemented. IIRC (boeroer probably remembers better) that stone of power is an "active" bonus that still stacks for +1 PL (items are sometimes weird like that). The ooze trinket might also stack.

All potions and food are considered active bonuses (with a caveat) so they don't stack with other active bonuses. However, corpse-eater food bonus appears to be set up so its gated for just corpse-eater - this also means it stacks with other active bonuses because it's a different type of bonus. The big caveat is that a save/load cycle appears to change the status of a long-lived food/rest bonus from being "active" to "passive" so you can force food bonuses to stack. So technically you can stack food/rest bonuses like this, though it's up to the player to decide whether or not this is legit.

if this is the style of wizard you like to play you may find blood mage a bit less impressive - boeroer uses this as his common critique of the class. you'll be wasting a lot of time just whiffing on spell restoring the uses for those buffs when you could just empower or do something else. not as a big of a problem for prolonged fights. when i played around with blood mage the only buff i really cared about was deleterious alacrity of motion, and then i'd just focus on spamming the most abusive spell at the moment.

i mean, blood mage is just pretty danged good, i legit don't think any other wizard makes for a fair comparison. The only argument I can see against blood mage come down to playstyle difference - basically if you're not a fan of repetitively casting the same spells, abusing the blood sacrifice mechanic, then you should do something else. (even in non-prolonged fights the ability to game which spells you get back over and over is extremely powerful). objectively, evoker is pretty good - double cast bonus is pretty variable, but pretty great when it triggers (probably the best non-blood mage subclass bonus). if you want the most powerful wizard subclass, then like i said, i find it personally hard to argue against blood mage other than from a playstyle perspective. but if you want something fun, that just happens to pretty good, then I would focus just on the evoker's merits instead of trying to do a comparison with blod mage.

Man I must just suck with controlling the AC then. I feel like I was constantly triggering Vengeful Grief on Maia (which itself wasn't a total bad thing).

yeah, actually, come to think of it I think Wall of Thorns and Wicked Briars are like this - they don't have a poison keyword (at least not the tooltip) but their effects are preventable with antidote. Basically, my memory of my ancient DoT-er is that against naga they had very few options, which was annoying.

have to double-check. I mostly noticed this on Naga (especially SSS fights), it might be something specific to them. edit - huh, for some reason I thought Plague of Insects only had Beasts keyword?

from my experience, even though those (Insect Swarm and Plague of Insects) aren't tagged on the tooltip as poison or disease, enemies who are immune to poison or disease (i forget which specific one) are immune to them, which is annoying. I forget whether infestation of maggots is affected by this issue. It was pretty annoying with my ancient druid, who was specifically this sorta DoT build.

dang, guess I won't be the first tactician! congrats to mark twain, whomstever they are (not a forum goer I guess).

(Sorry for post formatting, it's real hard to selectively quote multiple things from a post) "How important is accuracy really? First thing you tell a new player on PotD is that they need to pump perception so they can actually hit things. Accuracy is king, they say." Who says this? Because they're wrong. Dex and int are kings. Perception is only slightly better than might, and that is pretty conditional. That being said... "Meanwhile, Rangers have effortless accuracy bonuses well beyond what other classes are capable of, so why aren’t they the kings? Either accuracy isn’t all that or Ranger aren’t being given the respect they deserve." The latter I agree with. It'd be one thing if rangers only got like a +5 acc bonus here or there, but they get so much accuracy that it overwhelms the sorta-marginal status of perception. It's not like any other class can get up to +50 dex or int (which would make them king), but even if perception/acc were weaker than it is now, a base +50 accuracy (stalker's link, marked prey, maxed hunter's claw, survival of hte fittest) would still be absurd just based on sheer quantity. "Animal Companions aren’t hard to keep alive! The number of times I’ve seen people recommend using Ghost Heart to ignore the AC altogether is absurd. " Animal companions are ridiculously hard to keep alive on PotD with upscaling on, even with Resilient Companion. IME you basically need to abuse Maia's pet's ability to avoid engagement or have a Bear + Hardy/Robust to really lean on your pet staying alive. Anyway, if people are really saying to use Ghost Heart to avoid the AC and this isn't a strawman, then this is definitely wrong. Ghost Heart's advantage is their pet ignores engagement, not that you don't have to worry about an AC. But! Sometimes the pet not staying alive is a feature, not a bug, thanks to various items and ranger skills that interact with a downed pet (and I don't think this works with Ghost Heart). "The Ranger skill tree is ridiculously bloated. Why are there FOUR animal companion perks at level 1, with bonuses as mundane as “do some more damage” and “be tougher”. It’s not like you’re investing in playstyle options with your AC – these are just sucking up ability points to make the AC better in utterly boring ways. Vicious and Resilient Companion shouldn’t exist – these should just be AC base stats. Have us choose the other two." I think this is purely an artifact of playing on upscale+PotD. On PotD Vicious and Resilent Companions basically become mandatory, whereas on lower difficulty they are much more purely playstyle choices. "Then there’s the completely unnecessary separation of some perks into two. " I think you're underestimating how viable a skill might be on its own without the upgrade, like Concussive Shot. Have happily used it just for the interrupt without upgrading it to do -30s (which while great, is really not that great if you have other sources in your party like Arcane Dampener, Arcane Cleansing, or even just Street Sweeper). "Wounding Shot and Arcane Archer imbue spells are permanently broken. Wounding Shot never did nearly as much damage as its description indicated and it still doesn’t. Why wasn’t this fixed? That’s the Ranger’s signature damage ability and it sucks. Imbue spells still don’t scale properly, so they are missing out on damage and penetration that they should have. That’s the subclasses entire thing and Obsidian left it broken even as modders at least patched the penetration. This is just neglectful." I suspect Obsidian never realized how broken Wounding Shot was - there's a lot of complex mechanics, they have fewer eyeballs and resources than the collective fanbase of forumgoers, so it probably just never rose to much prominence. Maybe they overestimated Wounding Shot being valued for triggering Predator's Sense, even though there are a bajillion other ways to trigger it. Does the community patch fix it? As for Arcane Archer, I was under the impression they did fix it - guess not. Kind of the problem with making such huge changes in a near-end-of-lifecycle patch. Anyway aside from those specific points, I do agree that people seem to undervalue the ranger, though I don't agree that Obsidian doesn't care about the ranger - they literally added several new skills ot the ranger over time, which is why the ranger is as awesome as it is today (hunter's claw line especially). I'm not sure any other class got straight-up new abilities.

I would make a much stronger endorsement than Boeroer does. I'd say it's good enough, and special enough, that every fighter or fighter multiclass should pick it up, unless they are planning on equipping cloth or running around naked. While it's not going to break the game or make you win fights you couldn't before, the bonus is general enough and solid enough that pretty much any playstyle benefits.

i think pure monk would do it - monk has a Flagellant's Path/Launching Kick which is sort of like a fake flight. Plus you end up with way better punches when single-classed.

disclaimer: i only know about avengers from casually watching the movies. shouldn't it be war hammers, that poor neglected category of weapon? (edit - whoops, missed that Jayd already mentioned this) (Too bad there's no Crom Faeyr-style weapon like from BG2, that would be perfect). Also, if there was ever a RP build for the deltro's shock combo, here it is. I think early MCU hulk is berserker, maybe even a berserker with that unique weapon that randomly frenzies you. I think late MCU hulk is a druid of some sort, since in Endgame he's basically perma-hulk mode and doing stuff, which sounds a little bit like an ancient or animist (not shifter since you can't do anything other than smash while shifted). Maybe an animist + some priest so you can salvation of time cat flurry mode. yeah this is weird, because hawkeye doesn't really have any kind of companion, but the insane accuracy a ranger+companion gets would fit with hawkeye better. I guess you could consider the ghost heart spirit animal sort of a "second sight" to help aiming instead of a real animal companion. what about ant man? black panther? edit - actually, maybe black panther should be the shifter, especially with cat form. i have no idea how you could represent ant man in deadfire though.

so i definitely just did tests again, with more DoTs, with Soul Ignition and Disintegrate specifically as well (since I had just assumed their behavior before), with no mods, and can confirm that Takedown Combo does affect all apparent DoTs while active (this time I even explicitly tested multiple DoTs going on at the same time). It doesn't matter if Takedown Combo lands first or the DoT lands first and Combo comes after, as soon as Takedown Combo is present DoT damage increases. I still didn't test all the DoTs specifically, but I feel like with this even more comprehensive test I can more confidently conclude that in your case there must've been something else going on. And just to double-confirm, I did test hazard-type effects and they are definitely losers here. Getting only one tick at double damage and eating up the Combo is definitely the lamest possible interaction. Definitely going to go roll an itinerant for my "fun" run. Shining Beacon, Cleansing Flame as short-duration DoTs, plus a few high-impact damage spells (Pillar of Holy Fire, Divine Mark). Back to the OPs topic, Disintegrate would do well. I was doing triple-digit raw damage per tick the entire time Takedown Combo was active with Disintegrate with an extremely unoptimized Serafen, I even combined with Soul Ignition for even more damage. The only trick is that Takedown Combo doesn't last too long so you have to do a wee bit of micromanagement so that you're in the middle of casting a spell or have just landed a spell when you command your animal companion to do the takedown, so you don't waste the combo's duration. (Not to mention the micromanagement of making sure no one auto-attacks your target after you land the combo.) In my test case, takedown combo lasted ~12s, with Soul Ignition at ~20s and Disintegrate at ~15s, so I would cast Soul Ignition, cast Disintegrate, and then takedown combo, and watch a stupid amount of damage come out for the ~12s.

ok that's weird, i'll have to test more dots see if i also run into exceptions (i only tested like 4). is this any interaction with the community mod?