JerekKruger

You can't enchant Bash to give it more damage. All you can do is add Shield enchants to improve the protectiveness of your shield. If damage is what you want then, honestly, you're better off going two-handed or dual wielding (or even going with a single one-handed weapon without a shield). A sword and board Paladin is going to do fairly poor damage until they get Sacred Immolation. Honestly, all Paladins tend to be fairly unimpressive damage until they get Sacred Immolation. Damage dealing simply isn't a Paladin's forte. Flames of Devotion is a great ability, but it's only 2/encounter and apart from that the Paladin doesn't really have any abilities or talents dedicated to improving their damage.

I avoid Large Shields because of the Accuracy penalty, which is probably a mistake on my part. Well, I also avoid Large Shields because I don't feel like beetroot is a very heroic emblem :D

Yeah, there seem to be two good bash shields in the game, Badgradr's Barricade and the Dragon's Maw Shield. The latter is soulbound and can only be used by Barbarians and Fighters so for a Paladin you're restricted to the former (well, you can use Dragon's Maw, but it won't level up and hence will never get it's attack proc). If I remember correctly (anyone who knows better, do correct me) if you use a bash shield your attack speed remains the same, but you alternate between attacking with your shield and with your weapon. Given that bash will, generally, do worse damage than a weapon this will make your autoattack dps go down. However, bash shields do count as a second weapon when it comes to full attacks, so whilst a weapon and bash shield won't be as good as dual wielding two weapons with something like Flames of Devotion, it will do better damage that just a single-handed weapon. Personally, for a Paladin, I'd go with the Outworn Buckler, upgrading to the Little Savior when you get it (unless Outworn and Savior stack, in which case I'd be tempted to put Savior on someone else).

Just filled the survey in. I apologise to everyone who hates Durance... As for Blizzard, they do one thing well, and that's polish and friendly UI. Other than that I'd agree that their current developments don't interest me at all.

Especially not if it's biting/

Don't be ridiculous Boeroer, Obsidian added in Soul Whips just for you!

I've got to admit, of all the adjectives one might attach to "harem", "pain" is probably near the bottom of my list.

It's nice to get twin damage types too. At this point you really need to rename your build thread "Ladies of Pain" since it contains about a million variants on the build.

Remember that, unlike in D&D*, crit chance increases with the difference between Accuracy and Deflection, so whilst you might be hit just as often with 10 Resolve as you are with 3, you'll likely be crit a lot more. Also as Dr <3 says, every time you're hit there's a chance you'll be interrupted, adding a bit of time to your recovery. This is defended against with Concentration, which is tied to Resolve, so tanking Resolve leads to being interrupted a lot, which leads to frustrating combat. This is less of a problem if you're using a reach weapon like a Pike, and can hide behind other characters to avoid getting hit, but with a Greatsword you're going to be in melee range of enemies and you're going to get hit. Personally I dislike lowering any attribute lower than 8 for role-play reasons. To my mind, a Resolve 3 character represents someone with literally no ability to resist temptation. The sort of person who answers "yes" to the question "would you like to..." before it's even finished. I don't like playing characters like that so I keep my attributes at or above 8. Obviously you might not feel the same, this is just personal preference. *I haven't played D&D since 3.5 so this might not be true anymore. However back when I played, crits were determined by your unmodified hit roll.

I would never dishonour the memory of St Rumbalt by doing that

A quick question regarding the Hours of St Rumbalt: can the Accuracy 3 enchantment be overwritten with a Superb or Legendary one?

Well now that's just discriminatory towards Dwarves! I'll have you know that Dwarves are proportionally over represented in the Vailian Royal Academy of Animantic Sciences! But if you insist on bashing in skulls, War Hammers are definitely the way to go.

I always find the White Forge fight easier than the fight against spirits and vessels in the corridor just before it. That said, I usually have a tankier party than the OP and I play on PotD where those spirit/vessel encounters get pretty huge.

Well, you don't have to click the option :D The game does sometimes feel a bit forced in its information drop dialogue options. By the time you reach Defiance Bay it feels odd that you can still ask almost everyone about the Hollowborn Plague as though your character doesn't know what it is. I guess Obsidian didn't want anyone to miss that but still... But yeah some of the unique dialogues don't quite fit. There's a similar problem where if you choose Aedyran as your background you can still ask Aloth to tell you what Aedyr is. Hopefully PoE2 will do this sort of thing a bit better. Alternatively they can use the standard "you wake up with no memory of anything" RPG start :D

Honestly, I'd not dump Resolve so much, especially in the early game and especially if you don't want to spend much time on the ground. Similarly for Barbarians I'd avoid dropping Constitution below 10. I'd probably go with something more like Mig 16 Con 10 Dex 12 Per 14 Int 16 Res 10 Explanation: Obviously Might and Intellect are important for a damage dealing Barbarian but unlike in some RPG rulesets all attributes scale linearly in PoE so you don't have the same impetus to chase max values. Barbarians have the highest Health and Endurance multipliers, which means they suffer more from the percentage decrease from Constitution below 10 (and gain more from above 10) so I avoid going below 10 on Barbarians. The Dexterity score is perhaps debatable: in the early game Dexterity is important for attack speed but at level 7 the Barbarian gets access to Blood Thirst which makes attack speed much less important, and even before this the speed bonuses from Frenzy and Bloodlust make having lower Dexterity less important. In fact I'd even consider lowering Dexterity to 10. Barbarians have comparatively low accuracy for a melee class, so I like to make up for this with a few points in Perception. I am others will disagree with this choice though. Finally, the above attribute spread gives a nice balance of defences i.e. you get +12 to all of Fortitude, Reflex and Will, whereas your original spread suffers from low Will.

Whilst it's indisputable that, amongst two-handers, Great Swords have the widest selection of good weapons available early, there are some pretty good options in amongst other types of two-handers. The Blade of the Endless Paths is one of two two-handers with the Speed enchant, and is the better of the two. Mabec's Morning is the only two-hander with the Stunning enchant and its other enchants aren't bad (Slaying (Wilder) is obviously situational); Daybreak has Destroys Spirits so can be used similarly to St. Ydwen's Redeemer (though it's available a lot later); and Acuan Giamas has the great Wounding enchant and the fairly unique and interesting Spellchance enchant. For Pikes we have Tall Grass, which is generally good and particularly good in a Barbarian's hands. It starts getting less good when we get to Pollaxe's: if Traitor's Merit had Overbearing then it would have an amazing synergy but as it is you're relying on others sources to provide the afflictions; at first glance, Half-Mast is a sort of poor man's Tall Grass, but at least it has two damage types; and the WInd's Arm is... I don't really know. Quarterstaves are probably the most lacking, with no truly standout weapons, but Llawran's Stick is at least decent with the Speed enchant.

Is there any enemy that is very resistant to both crushing and piercing?

The Outworn Buckler is one of those items which superficially looks pretty bad, but is actually an amazing item.

Is that the fight where you go down a long corridor that looks as though it should be trapped, but isn't, then after getting the adra disc a bunch of spirits appear and suddenly the corridor is trapped? If so then yeah, it's a nasty fight. As Boeroer says, paralysis is indeed the main danger, so anything that improves you saves against that will make the fight a lot easier. It took me a few tries to beat that fight on PotD.

Rapier in the main hand and dagger (specifically a main-gauche dagger) is probably the quintessential dueling combination. You can also guarantee that almost every single knight who ever rode into battle in Europe had a dagger as a secondary or tertiary weapon (as would any soldier who could afford one in addition to their primary weapon). Honestly, daggers were probably the single most widespread weapon in this period (and maybe all of European history). Their association with rogue type characters probably comes from two things: (i) a dagger is a lot cheaper than a sword, since there is a lot less metal involved in its construction and (ii) they can be easily concealed. That said, I suspect a lot of bandits and cut purses in medieval and renaissance Europe will have actually used knives rather than daggers since knives will have been cheaper and more widespread amongst the sort of people likely to turn to such occupations. But the image of the dagger as solely, or primarily a thief or assassin's weapon is very much the creation of modern fantasy writing.

To be precise, the Darcozzi are tied to Old Vailia rather than the Vailian Republics. Old Vailia seems to represent the Eoran equivalent of, say, the Byzantine Empire insofar as it's the remnants of a once greater empire. That said, Old Vailia does seem closer to Italian than Byzantine-Greek in naming so I've tended to treat them as sort of renaissance Italian as well. I'd never thought of the musketeer analogy but that does seem very fitting.

The impression I get from the way Vailians are depicted in the game, and the little lore about the Darcozzi there is, I get the impression that it would be quite common for them to get into a lot of duels, and the classic dualing weapons would be a rapier and dagger, so I could very much see a Darcozzi using the Ublabored Blade together with a rapier.

Most companion quests simply serve to flesh out the companion's backstory, so if you don't like the companion you won't be missing out on much more than a small amount of experience (which you really don't need). The exceptions that I can think of are Zahua and Maneha, both of whom get a permanent upgrade from completing their quest. Then again, if you don't plan to use them, you're not missing out on skipping their quests either. One thing I will say though is that Durance's quest, which is essentially just a giant dialogue tree, is related to the main story quite closely. That said, I think you can simply leave him in Brighthollow (the inn in Caed Nua) and simply drop by every now and again to have a chat. I don't think you need to actually have him your party.

Blaming MMOs is cool? Damn, I guess I'll have to stop doing so.