pi2repsion

And I am not claiming that you are so locked. If somebody is reading this looking to solve the problem, your advice is good. It is, however, irrelevant to what I described, and what you have been responding to the last few posts, which was how I solved it based on the circumstances I was in, where I didn't know there were clues next to the door because I hadn't noticed them, and thus logically didn't have "exit, read the hints next to the door, solve the puzzle vs. brute force" as the choice, but "exit, try to find out if there are hints somewhere, then return vs. brute force". I thought that sharing some of the methodology and thoughts I used for brute force solving this particular simple problem, which I used because it was the rational approach in the situation I was in given the knowledge I had at the time, might be useful for other players in similar situation. Games, and CRPGs in particular, are full of combination problems and not all come with exhaustive or readily available hints, and knowing how to proceed if they are types amenable to brute force solutions rather than being stumped and dependent on hints or reading answers on the internet is a valuable gaming skill.

The more melee characters you use, the less you need anybody dedicated to tanking. Have the damage spread out over several of your characters and healing is easier anyhow. Running 3-4 melee, all dedicated to damagedealing rather than tanking, but wearing heavy armour, is perfectly viable regardless of difficulty level. Just make sure that everybody but the rogue takes the Hold the Line talent for +1 engagement. That being said, of the companions there is one who is great for tanking if you want to go 1H+shield, and that is Pallegina. Even without the conversation bonuses to Faith and Conviction, Paladins get solid defenses and there's a buckler to be bought in the very first village that gives +5 to all defenses for everybody near the wielder (including the wielder), stacking with all other bonuses, which can only be used by a Paladin. Which makes having Pallegina anchor your front line with a good one-hander and that buckler pretty much ideal. And you want a Paladin for the Zealous Aura of your choice anyway. And for Liberating Exhortation. And Revive. And Lay on Hands. And... Well, you want a Paladin, dammit, they are so darned useful. (Of course, you can also use her 2H and do a reasonable job of damagedealing, but if you are going to have anybody using shields at all, she is the obvious choice.) Eder with 2H, taking the best-of-the-best passive tanking talents/abilities, Hold the Line, and otherwise focusing on damage talent/abilities, is when wearing heavy armour a very competent front line damage dealer/tank. Durance works pretty well on the front line too, either 1h+Shield or 2H, wearing heavy armour. Tough as a rock, and in an ideal position for his Concecrated Ground spell to cover all the melee. It all depends on how much you want to focus on his spellcasting, which to a large degree comes down to how many spellcasters there are in the party; Is he to be the swiss army knife that buffs during the first few seconds of combat and heals every once in a while, holding spells in reserve for emergencies, while a wizard or druid blasts away, or is he the star of the show, going through his spells like there is no tomorrow? In the latter case, you want him ranged in light armour to maximize spellcasting, in the latter that isn't a requirement. Kana is another that works well both as ranged and in melee, having stats amenable for both; Chanters start out with high deflection and they get many chants that debuff enemies or buff friends, though one is likely to use different chants depending on whether melee or range. (In melee the Chanter aura AOE will overlap most enemies but likely not all friends, at range it is likely to overlap all friends but only a few enemies). I haven't tried the new monk, but it would be deeply surprising if he didn't make a decent damagedealer/tank if stuffed into heavy armour.

Not at the point in time when I said they didn't, they don't. All I said was that they don't show up when you are interacting with the door and getting the choose your own adventure type interface. (And they shouldn't. It is a completely separate interface designed to pick you out of the action.) I am perfectly aware that, under other circumstances, were I to have examined the surroundings before engaging with the door, I would have been aware of them and factored their existence into my decision. EDIT: Anyhow, a digression. The original question has been answered and, to nobody's particular surprise, I am sure, different people approach the game in different ways.

To be precise with regards to the bow, the small dwarven tower is outside Durgan's Battery.

As Doppelschwert says, there are exactly five soulbound weapons in the game currently, and they are all in the White March. His spoiler is not entirely correct. If you want to know what the weapons are and where you find them in White March, you need to visit one of the spoiler forums. THIS POST will tell you everything you need.

Be that as it may, I didn't know that when I was at the door and had to make my decision between attempting to solve it by logic and persistence and solving it by hunting for clues. And you don't see anything highlighted with the investigation tool while engaging in the CYOW sequence with the door.

Where on earth did this "Devil of Caroc's backstory is a perfect killing machine" fantasy come from? Here is her backstory: 1. Born to parents in a village. 2. Trained to trap animals. 3. Lived in the village of Cold Morn most of her life. 4. After her village of Cold Morn was destroyed and family killed by a mob of villagers from other villages in the aftermath of the Saint's War, she devoted her time to tracking them down and killing those villagers who killed her family, but happy enough to kill any other member of the Cold Morn mob and not averse to killing others that crossed her. She did this for some years and earned the name "Devil of Caroc" for some atrocity she committed in the village of Caroc. 5. Captured by villagers in Stalwart. 6. Soul transferred to a bronze body made by Galvino in the village of Stalwart using whatever he could get his hands on, which he was waiting to infuse with a soul, then evicted together with him. 7. Used by Galvino to assassinate criminals near his house and intruders. 8. Joined up with the Watcher. I just don't see anything in her backstory that suggests she is a perfect killing machine. If we look at her backstory: She's a trapper... So she's probably fairly Perceptive (unless she was a bad trapper). She is ruthless and has determination in spades, so she must have high Resolve. She's been physically active for all her life, so probably above average Constitution. Being physically active all her life and mentally strong, she is probably above average in Might. Having managed to plan and carry out many killings over the years before getting caught, her Intelligence is probably average or above. Dexterity? Nothing we know of her history indicates either high or low dexterity. It could be anything, but probably above average lacking other information. And that gives us her stats based on her backstory. She's not the perfect killer who got her soul shunted into a machine designed for fighting, making her the perfect killing machine, she is a determined trapper who wanted to avenge her family, killed a lot of people, most of them poor at fighting, and got her soul shunted into a bronze body that was not designed for killing. ...Just like all the other companions in the game. Make up a backstory and give appropriate stats, don't design companions to optimize mechanics and then try to fit in a story, and make sure that the game can be completed using these characters without optimization. And while I too would certainly have liked from a game mechanics perspective for her bronze body to be of plate armour quality rather than inferior Brigandine, it certainly fits the story well enough. It just happens to be the victim of the great failure that is the armour itemization system in POE, where there is little reason for anybody to choose anything other than a) the heaviest armour available, b) the lightest armour available. Giving somebody an unremovable medium armour does feel like a bad joke. ---- EDIT: For what it is worth, and answering the original question, I quite like the Devil of Caroc because she has a neat backstory that fits very well into the overall story of POE and has occasional funny comments in a not too annoying voice - much like another of my favourite companions, Eder. Like Eder, the farmboy who went to war, she also has stats that fit her backstory very well. She is about far from being an optimized melee rogue or optimized ranged but competent at both, just like Eder is competent both as a front line damagedealer and tank, but nowhere near optimized. But then, Eder is Eder, not Deathbringer or TankyMcSpank, and the Devil of Caroc, for all her fanciful nickname, is also a person rather than a role. I have her running around with the Hours of St. Rumbalt and the Grey Sleeper, chopping up enemies like there is no tomorrow in my current POTD game, and while she is mechanically inferior in all ways to an optimized melee rogue in this role, she certainly performs well enough. I'm having more problems with the monk. This is a combination of a) being supremely uninterested in martial arts as well as the generic fantasy trope of monks being martial arts experts with mystical insights, and b) his personality as presented in the initial encounter and followup discussion. It is entirely possible that I'd open up to a deeper appreciation of his personality if I was forced to adventure with him for some time, but all I came away with after recruiting him and exploring his personal conversation option was, "he's the guy who thought resting in a barrel of fish was a good idea, seeks some long-lost technique of the old masters (yawn), and is a poster-child for why getting high on mushrooms before discussing philosophy or religion is a bad idea. If I wanted any of that, I'd just reread the Revelation of St. John, for old John of Patmos was considerably more entertaining in his madness, and the writers at Obsidian just aren't up to scratch."

Yes. One quality, one proof, and one attribute. That's what you can enchant on armour. You can upgrade quality and attribute, but as there are no upgrades for proofing, the proofing you choose is the one it retains forever more.

I am assuming in the following that you are comparing weapons with the same weapon speed (or at least taking weapon speed and any on-hit enchant effects into consideration), as comparing e.g. a fast accuracy weapon like a rapier with a higher damage range weapon like a sabre and looking just at the fast/damage range without considering weapon speed is a mistake. Accuracy vs the others: 5 points of Accuracy from weapon is nearly worth a full talent point. HOWEVER, there are many ways of boosting accuracy in game and the further one gets in the game the more are readily available, while there are no ways to improve the base weapon damage or change the base damage types of a weapon, and few ways of getting extra DR. So all else being equal, Accuracy just doesn't match up unless the weapon has some outstanding enchant that isn't readily available otherwise. DR and higher damage vs dual physical damage types. MOST enemies have roughly the same DR against the different physical damage types, making 3 or 5 DR objectively better against dual physical damage types, giving a small but consistent advantage. MOST of the time. A higher damage range from sabre gives DR a run for the money. Which is best in a given situation - all enchants being ignored - depends on how much you graze/hit/crit - but as this is too much bother to work out, just accept that it is roughly as effective as DR unless you have a heavily crit focused build, in which case the higher damage range is better. So MOST of the time you'll gain a small advantage from not using dual physical damage types. But most isn't the same as all, and there are a considerable number of enemies that have DR that is more than 5 higher against some physical damage types than others, and a smaller but still noticeable number of enemies, typical harder enemies, where the DR of one is very much higher than the other two (and a very few that have two high and one low), where dual physical damage types may do much better or, in some cases, a lot better. And then there are the enemies that are immune to a physical damage type, while they are few and far between, if your enemy is immune to your DR weapon's sole damage type, you are pretty much out of luck and will have to use another weapon. As an amusing example, those blights up in the White March are immune to Blunt Damage, and the soulbound Greenstone Staff, which deals blunt damage, requires you to kill Blights with it. (So you'll have to beat up other Blights that aren't immune back in the main game to level it up). But frankly? They all work well. My preference is for dual damage types, because I prefer their general reliability and the game supplies me with many good Greatswords - marriage of desire and convenience, so to speak.

And I would like to request less crafting/enchanting. I will say this for it; It is lightweight and has a well designed interface, something that I greatly approve of. With regards to the balance between what players who like crafting and what players who abhore crafting desire, the designers have probably struck a good balance. Some people prefer crafting their own equipment and collecting a bunch of ingredients that allow them to hit the "make my day" button, some people prefer finding storied treasure supposedly made by craftsmen labouring many days over their work, that isn't diminished in in-game importance by being beaten in quality by a bum collecting ten dead rats and a ripe pineapple and wriggling his fingers suggestively, or at any rate magically, over them, creating the newest artefact of doom with less effort than it takes to say "catastrophic loss of immersion". From my perspective, it isn't as bad in POE as it is many other modern CRPGs, but it is bad enough due to not only the compulsive hoarding of dozens of ingredients (as in all crafting systems, but at least they are put into a separate inventory...) and due to the strict limitations the enchant-cost design puts on item design and on what players will consider useful items. Let me give you an example that doesn't contain spoilers (much). There are items in the game that you find close to, at, or above the 12 point enchant limit due to being interestingly designed rather than "one generic effect, one interesting effect, leave the rest to the player to fill out". Are you, as a player, ever going to be using these interesting items or even be tempted to? Unless the reason is that 6 of those points were spent on Superb, the answer is, probably not. Because some weapon or armour that uses most of its enchantment points on things that are occasionally useful, but is unable to be enchanted to exceptional or superb status, is strictly inferior to any item that can. For the weapon/armour/shield slots, there are only a few of the many unique items in the game that are generally used by players, because they have some valuable enchant effect that cannot be manually replicated, while at the same time having enough free points to be promoted with the general enchants, as the player progresses, to exceptional and/or superb status. Combine that with how armour recovery speed is itemized, and it gets even worse - though that's not so much a fault of the enchantment system, as a case of it exaggerating the defects of the armour system. From a game mechanics perspective, there is little reason to wear any armour that is not either a) plate armour with 50% recovery penalty, or b) exceptionally light armour with close to 0% recovery penalty, unless that armour is awesome in some way. But the system makes it really, really, hard to make any armour but that with the highest DR or lowest recovery penalty awesome, since quality, proofing, and stat boosting is available to the player to enchant at will at negligible cost. Got a frontline of three melee? You'll have three exceptional plate armours once you hit level 8 via enchanting, make no doubt, with useful proofing and stat boosting. Probably by promoting your existing fine plate armour, you enchanted at level 4. With the White March addon, it is possible to make awesome robes, because they can be White Forge enchanted to cancel out the recovery penalty, but everything with greater recovery penalty than robes and less armour than plate armour remains trapped with the why would anybody wear something like this question, because anybody can enchant a stock plate armour or clothing/Berathian Priest Robe to provide as much DR as the item type allows, proofing of choice, and a +1 or +2 to the stat highest desired, depending on whether the character in question needs DR more than recovery speed or vice versa. If you couldn't improve armour at will, then some medium/heavy armour of Hide to Brigandine variety could, conceivably, be interesting if e.g. you found one that was exceptional while you only had access to fine heavy armour, or one that was superb would be be relevant when you were otherwise limited to exceptional plate armor or only had very limited access to superb plate armour, and they otherwise had interesting stats. But you can improve armour with enchants, so there's little reason save style for ever wearing anything heavier than robes and lighter than plate armor, and we aren't all stylish. :D It is enough to make one cry for all the man-hours that went into designing unique graphics for all those sets of armour that see little use outside catwalk performances in Defiance Bay.

Good question, Killyox. I should have been more careful in my formulation. I didn't check more closely for a possible offset due to the current character panel accuracy confusion, just saw that "yup, it seems to roughly match what I think is my rogue's accuracy".

Read the log to see exactly what happens. Best guess is that you are expecting too much from the talent, excepting it to protect you from being charmed/dominated/whatnot, when its magnitude, while a respectable +10, does nothing of the sort - what it does is shift the interval for miss/graze/hit/crit by 10%. So let's say that somebody tries to charm one of your characters. This works like every other attack effect in the game - it has a certain accuracy A against your defense D of the targeted defense. (Typically will for charm and domination). A 1d100 is rolled, d, and the outcome of the attack is d+A-D. The outcome is then checked to see whether it is a miss, graze, hit, or crit. up to 15 result in a miss. 16-50 result in a graze, that charms for 50% duration 51-100 result in a hit, that charms for 100% duration 101 or above result in a crit, that charms for 150% duration. So let's look at some simple cases and ignore possible conversion talents or skills (e.g. those that convert hits to crits, grazes to misses, or whatever). If your defense is equal to the accuracy, then A-D = 0, and you will be charmed in accordance with the table above, i.e. 15% chance to miss, 35% chance to graze, 50% chance to hit, 0% chance to crit. In other words, 85% charm attacks will result in you being charmed for at least 50% duration. If you add +10 defense to this case, then the resulting A-D = -10, and the situation is different. Now all die rolls from 1-25 (25%) result in a miss, 26-60 (35%) in a graze, and 61-100 (40%) in a hit, 0% in a crit. You are still being charmed most of the time (75%), but less frequently than before and less frequently for the full duration. While this is definitely better, it certainly won't feel overwhelmingly better, as most of the time, the charm will succeed. But what if you already had a high defense value, due to stacking protective equipment, stats, or casting buffing spells? Then the situation is different indeed. As an example, if you have 50 better defense than enemy accuracy, all rolls from 1-65 (65%) will result in misses, 66-100 (35%) in grazes, and 0% in hit and crits. In this case, getting an extra +10 will cut the grazes from 35% to 25%, reducing the odds of enemy success by almost a third. Now, you are unlikely to get defenses 50 better than the accuracy of the attack unless you buff your own defenses and/or debuff the attacker, but... well, that's what the spells are there for. You are unlikely ever to have high enough defenses to be immune, but that's really not the point. It is all about making it less likely to be affected and ensuring that when you are affected, it is likely to be only a graze (with only 50% duration). (Of course, once you reach level 11 and get Prayer Against Treachery it becomes fairly trivial to defend yourself, as that one also cuts down on the time of the effects). Note that if somebody does get charmed/dominated, you can charm/dominate them right back, having them under your control while both your and their control spells tick down, until your control spell runs out. So is Mental Fortress worth it? In most cases, I would say not. But that's because I prefer seizing the initiative and crowd controlling those who have these abilities. But if you are building somebody with super duper will saves that are critical for surviving charm/domination attacks (typically a paladin or priest), or if you have a character that - for whatever reason - doesn't have anything more generally useful to pick, it might well be worth it.

I may be wrong, farleybear, but on the face of it - not knowing how you approach combat, so I might be mistaken - that sounds like more of a formation problem and sloppy tactics than anything else. Their ranged paralyzation attacks aren't especially long range, so there's no way they should be hitting Durance and Aloth first unless you allow them to. The way I approach combat against dangerous foes is approaching the fights under cover of stealth, positioning my front line nice to block/intercept incoming enemies, and then starting combat from long range by having somebody shoot at one of the enemies nearest me and then opening up with Prayer Against Imprisonment from Durance and Deleterious Alacrity of Motion from my wizard (and Kana using a summoning figurine to summon shades or beetles or whatnot between my front line and the enemy), ensuring that I cast the essential buffs and summons before enemies have a chance to attack any members of my group, with auto-pause on combat start and finishing ability use to allow me to step through the early combat spells to buff and gain battlefield control without wasted time. (This may seem a bit overcautious, but I am playing on POTD so caution is advised.) Prayer Against Imprisonment is a Fast Cast spell, so it is utterly impossible for any Lagufaeth to run into range and then shoot/hit Durance before he completes it if you position your party sensibly before opening combat, and that is certainly possible in all the Lagufaeth encounters in White March, should you so desire.

There is a known bug with the character panel failing to update information in 2.01, leading to much accuracy confusion.

Good luck with prayer against imprisonment. Even with the reduced duration you can spend the whole fight paralyzed if they keep hitting you. In the end I just try to cast spells like relentless storm, plague of insects, noxious burst, malignant cloud and hope the monsters will die by themselves. I said Prayer Against Imprisonment works perfectly well, which it does. When cast on the entire party, it transforms the single most dangerous attribute of the Lagufaeths from a deadly threat to an irritant as most of the party will be unaffected by paralysis most of the time. This trivializes the fight. The prayer transforms the Lagufaeth fights into fights like the many others throughout the game against groups of mixed ranged and melee enemies, where the enemies have abilities that occasionally stop the characters they are attacking from acting for a handful of seconds, and you can handle the Lagufaeth fights the same way as you do them, whether it is by gritting your teeth and persevering through damage and occasional incapacitation or by using crowd control and slaughtering the helpless.

This sounds like a bug; Report it in the technical support forum.

Okay, I checked the Overbearing effect of the Hours of St. Rumbalt and Tall Grass. It works like this: Every crit with an Overbearing weapon causes a separate roll with your weapon accuracy vs. fortitude to cause prone for 3 seconds. So it doesn't automatically apply on every crit, but since most enemies have considerably lower fortitude than your rogue's accuracy, it will feel as if it did since most crits will reapply prone.

There were clues? I tried the cardinal directions one at a time and noticed that I got feedback when I got the right direction and a reset when not, which meant it had to be a sequence. Since I got immediate feedback both on right and wrong choices, it meant that for a sequence n steps long, rather facing 4^n complexity I was facing at worst a complexity of 4n, which meant around 2 tries per step to find the combination. Since games rarely rely on players memorizing combinations longer than 4 or 5 numbers, there was a reasonable change that it would be solved in at most 10 attempts. And much less if there was no reuse of directions, with a maximum length of 4 in that case. Both cases seemed likely to take much less time than examining the already explored areas for clues I had missed, so I did it, only limited in my speed of entering combinations by the speed of the game showing the choose-your-path screens, and it was quickly solved.

This is a truly minor bug that has been around since release 1.0, which most players probably take for granted. I tried searching for it and found no recent mentions here, so thought it was time to bring it up once again after a player in the main forum thought perception was the trap/secret-finding skill, because his main character (in party slot #1) with high perception was listed as finding everything that was found by his high mechanics character. (Which will happen a lot if you move around with the group as the main character is by default in slot #1 if you don't change it.) The bug is: Whenever the game reports "Hidden Object Found (nameOfCharacter)" or "nameOfCharacter has found something" in the log, the game uses the name of the first (leftmost) character in the currently active selection rather than the name of the person who finds something. This happens consistently, even if the person finding something isn't a member of the current selection. (E.g. you currently have selected #3, 5, and 6, and before that you sent #2 out scouting - when #2 encounters something hidden while moving, #3 will be listed as finding it). The game should, of course, be using the name of the character that finds something in the log message. If you really, really, really need it, I can go recreate it and provide you with a save game and an output log sometime within the next 24h, as it is 100% reproducible in any area with an as yet undiscovered secret and has been so since 1.0 release, but it is so systemic that it ought to be trivial to track down and fix from the description unless your code base suffers from a surfeit of spaghetti code.

Current party: Pallegina: 1h+s. Different one-handers, mostly Shatterstar. Uses the outworn buckler from Gilded Vale for maximum party protection - it almost always affects the three other members of the front line as I use her to achor my front line, and when the rear line has to move closer to the front, they benefit too. Durance: 1h+s. Used different swords until I got soulbound Nightshroud. Uses a large shield for maximum protection. Eder: 2h. Tidefall/soulbound St. Ywes the Redeemer depending on situation. Devil of Caroc: 2h. Hours of St. Rumbalt/soulbound Grey Sleeper depending on situation. (Nice that I only need the Greatsword focus to gain +6 for both) Kana: ranged. Soulbound Stormcaller. Wizard main: ranged. The two-barreled rod from the White March which name I forget and isn't important anyway, because my wizard only uses it in trivial fights where I can't be arsed to lay waste to the field by spamming spells or casting K. Minor Blights. I have just finished off the White March content and don't rightly know what I'll do once I gain the Blade of the Endless Paths. Sure, it is a good weapon, but I want Pallegina to stay 1h+s due to using the herald buckler to boost the front line's defenses, and Durance is mostly casting spells anyway, so giving him a 2h rather than 1h+s seems contraindicated. Oh, well, having more top quality to choose from than I need is a luxury problem.

Let's just say POTD is definitely not difficult like IWD's Heart of Fury mode. But then, neither was it in 1.0. It is merely more tactically challenging. And neither POTD or HOF modes came anywhere close to making their optional toughest encounters as tough as the optional fight against the Mulmaster Beholder Corps supported by High Priests, Rakshasa, and Dark Elf Fighters in Curse of the Azure Bonds, which to this very day remains the gold standard for outrageous combat difficulty in CRPG encounters that aren't designed to be impossible to outright win but merely a challenge. (When you don't cheese them, that is.) I'm not quite sure whether this should be lamented as a devolution of challenge or praised as an evolution in sanity, but I suspect the latter.

They disable the traps that otherwise occur when you pick up Nightshroud. Whether you consider that worth doing compared to, oh, I don't know, how about disarming the traps for experience... well, that's up to you. Truly a choice worthy of this emoticon:

For an alternative party composition that incorporates the companion rogue that I'm using on POTD, I'm running with a four strong heavily armoured melee front line rather than any dedicated "main" tank, and two ranged, one of them my wizard main who dishes out most of the damage. Here is my current team: But one could easily run such a melee heavy party with Aloth taking the wizard's job and another main character. Aloth wouldn't be as good as the player wizard due to lower might, dexterity, perception, and intelligence, but that goes for all the companions; They are all solid designs that can be used in several roles, but not optimized for any particular one. As a general rule, regardless of difficulty level, I suggest running at least 2-3 people on the front line so you can attempt to control access to squishy rear line members via tactical battlefield positioning rather than relying on the magical glue of engagement. You get a more tactical experience, better control of the situation, and have the advantage that incoming damage is distributed over more characters, not only making healing easier as most healing is moderate AOE healing rather than strong single-target healing, but also reducing the risk of point failure significantly. And making it much easier to run a damagedealing melee rogue as well. So what I am saying is, if you'd really like to play a rogue, as your first post certainly suggested, just go do it!. 1h, 2h, 1h+s, 2w, light or heavy armour - it will work. Regardless of the difficulty level you choose, you will be able to put together a team using the game's companions that will make it work well.

It is cursed, qwert_44643. Complete the steps given to you in verse to upgrade it to gain abilities, become superb, and break the curse. Then you can unequip it at your leisure. All the upgrade steps can be completed without fighting in areas you have already cleared in 10 minutes or so if you know what you are doing, so there's little reason not to go do that immediately after you pick it up.

Thanks, Ymarsakar and Boeroer. In that case, with good enough accuracy, the Hours will clearly be better than the Grey Sleeper for the purpose of ensuring that a disabling status effect granting crit is active as the paralysis, while having a very decent duration, only happens on 10% of hit and crits, i.e. 10% of the attacks that don't result in gazes and misses, while the prone effect will occur on 100% of crits, and a with decent accuracy and the relevant hit->crit talent, considerably more than 10% of a rogue's attacks will be crits. So for an endgame weapon, a highly enchanted Hours of St. Rumbalt will beat the snot out of the Grey Sleeper for the purpose of maintaining the target disabled and dealing high single target damage. (On anything not immune to prone). The Grey Sleeper's comparative advantage then, is that it is a weapon you can pick up at levels 6-9 depending on the difficulty level you are playing on, requiring you to fight 4-5 tough encounters in White March's Longfalls and then spending 10 minutes visiting some already cleared locations in the main game to turn it into a superb weapon, whereas the Hours can't be made superb until level 12. (But then, the Grey Sleeper can't be White Forge enchanted...) Of course the Grey Sleeper also has those nice 5% undead summons and 5% twin stones AOE, and there is that awesome thrice-per-rest -60% attack speed, -2.5 move speed for 15s FoeAOE debuff, but I guess that if one is to run 2H Rogue as a main, the Hours is where it is at. (Or specialize in Great Sword and use the Hours as primary weapon and Grey Sleeper when it makes sense - assuming there's no other in the party that needs that Estoc).