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This build was created for a collaboration with @Aestus who runs the Youtube channel Aestus_RPG. This is build 2 of 3 from that collaboration. You can find a link to that video down below. ----------------------------------------- This build is mainly meant for inspiration. You don't need to follow it in detail to have fun. If you understand the key features - the basic idea what makes this build special - you can usually deviate from non-core attribute-, skill-, gear- and ability selection and form the build to your own likings and ideas. ----------------------------------------- n the Living Lands, there exists a Druid named Rhuar - a rugged, rather ugly man with a deep connection to the natural world. Born in a small, secluded village on the fringes of a vast forest, Rhuar spent his youth learning the ways of both nature and martial combat. His affinity for the land and its tasty bugs was nurtured by the village's ancient traditions, passed down through generations of Druids. Rhuar discovered his spiritshift ability early on - able to transform into a wild boar, a creature of strength and resilience, embodying the untamed power of the wilderness - aaand able to sniff all the tasty bugs! This transformation not only granted him unparalleled endurance and a welcome snack every now and then, but also the remarkable ability to regenerate, healing wounds with every blow he takes. As a boar, Rhuar is a force of (dirty) nature, charging through enemies with ferocity and amouthful of chitin. But even when not in his animal form, Rhuar remains a formidable fighter. His years of training in hand-to-hand combat have turned him into a skilled pugilist. With fists like iron, he strikes with precision, using his human form to deliver punishing blows that complement his druidic powers. Though Rhuar’s life is simple, it is not without turmoil: driven by an unyielding sense of duty to protect the natural world from encroaching dangers and the wish to dig up some squishy worms from time to time, he roams the land, seeking balance between the feral instincts of his wild boar form and the wisdom of his human heart. Whether in battle or in peace, Rhuar is a guardian of nature a warrior with the soul of a beast and a tummy full of tasty bugs. =================================== The Vigorous Warthog =================================== Difficulty: PotD -------------------------------------------------------------- Class: Druid -------------------------------------------------------------- Race: Human (or Aumaua, Dwarf, Nature Godlike) -------------------------------------------------------------- Background: The Living Lands - Colonist -------------------------------------------------------------- Stats: MIG: 20 (+1 Living Lands) CON: 14 DEX: 12 PER: 12 INT: 16 RES: 04 -------------------------------------------------------------- Skills: Survival 12, Athletics 9 -------------------------------------------------------------- Talents (a=auto, r=recommended, !=important) 2: Wildstrike Shock (!)(or whatever element you like) 4: Novice's Suffering(!) 6: Veteran's Recovery(!) 8: Weapon Focus Peasant(r) 10: Greater Wildstrike Shock(r) 12: Two-Weapon-Style(r) 14: Outlander's Frenzy 16: Heart of the Storm Abilities 9: Spell Mastery: Nature's Vigor 11: Spell Mastery: Taste of the Hunt 13: Spell Mastery: Nature's Balm 15: Spell Mastery: Form of the Delemgan Story Talents: - Second Skin - Dungeon Delver - Song of the Heavens - Galawain's Boon (+1 MIG) - Gift from the Machine (+1 MIG) - Effigy's Resentment: Maneha (+1 MIG) --------------------------------------------------------------- Items (!=important, r=recommended): Weapon Set 1: fists (!)(Novice's Suffering) Weapon Set 2: two hatchets (r) Boots: Sandals of the Forgotten Friar (r) Head: Hermit's Hat Armor: Wayfarer's Hide/Sanguine Plate Neck: Mantle of the Dying Boar (obviously )/Fulvano's Amulet Belt: Wildstrike Belt® Rings: Pensiavi mes Rèi, Ring of Thorns Hands: Mourning Gloves/Gauntlets of Swift Action --------------------------------------------------------------- Hi again! Another late build for PoE - I was invited for a second interview by @Aestus again, this time for PoE: And since I talked about some PoE build ideas in the forum but never posted them, we thought this was a good opportunity to do so. The Vigorous Warthog is a Boar Druid - obviously. The Boar form grants two very good abilities while shifted: a wounding lash on your tusk weapons and also a constant regeneration effect similar to a Fighter's Constant Recovery. Speaking of Constant Recovery: the cross-class talent "Veteran's Recovery" does stack with the boar regeneration so we'll take it, too. We can build around those things and create a Druid who is surprisingly sturdy and at the same time does great melee damage while shifted, especially against enemies with thick armor. Wounding - as you might already know - scales with Might, and the healing you do does as well - so we have a double motivation to raise our Might high. This also helps all our spells that deal damage and heal us and others. We want to deal the majority of our melee damage when shifted - but Spiritshift is not endless and often enough we will shift back before the fight is over. For that we might need some fitting backup weapons. Best to use some who don't need a lot of mony and resources to be good, they are for backup only after all. Soulbound weapons come to mind or even a summoned weapon such as Firebrand: they scale without resources. Or - just hear me out - we use our fists. Novice's Suffering works in a weird way: it leaves your fists' base damage untouched but instead adds a rahter big flat damage bonus to them. Since most damage bonuses use the weapons' base damage as... well... base, adding damage bonuses to fists doesn't do much. But on the flipside damage maluses like grazes also don't influence the damage output much. The flat bonus however doesn't get influenced by anything - except Might! Yes, again Might - another reason to pump it. This leads to a set of backup weapons that does increbibly consistent damage, even if the wearer hasn't that much accuracy (like a Druid for example). And except the talent point they cost nothing. Later we add the Sandals of the Forgotten Friar. They add a second (small) flat dmg bonus to unarmed attacks and is also influenced by Might. Now we maxize it during character creation (Dwarf, Aumaua or Human for bonus Might - or even Nature Godlike for the chance to get stackable +3 MIG when under 50% endurance) and use a nice +MIG item (I chose a ring but it doesn't really matter). Outlander's Frenzy can give us another +3 MIG. But we can also use the Sanguine Plate for that: wait until you were hit by a crit and Frenzy procs, then spiritshift: the Frenzy will stay with you - and you spared a talent point. I picked the Wayfarer's Hide however - mostly because of the looks. Use the Blighthollow Resting in Caed Nua for +3 extra Might, it lasts for 3 rests in the wilderness. Make sure to pick up the Wildstrike Belt. What it does it pretty amazing (and obscured by its vague description): it will ad 10% to your Wildstrike damage it says. But what it really does: It adds +10% to your Wildstrike lash, raising it from 30% to 40%. But it also adds 10% to your Greater Wildstrike lash! Those two are separate lashes - and the latter one is only 15% which has to overcome enemies DR/4, too. Low lashes often get eaten up by enemies DR, so raiing this 15% lash to a 25% lash is great. Now your Wildstrike does +40% elemental lash damage and +25% elemental lash damage. No it's totally worth it to pick up one of the elemental damage talents like Heart of the Storm. It will raise both lashes, too: from 40% to 48% and from 25% to 30%. Now you do almost as much lash damage as physical tusk damage. And remember: wounding, buffed up by lots of MIG, comes on top! All Rogues who witness this go home crying and decide to attend Druid Evening School... Your Boar + Veteran's Regeneration is very good, too, allowing you to hang out at the front line after some levels. And you can always increase it with a powerful healing spell of course. The best apporach is to first cast some useful spells (Avenging Storm, Form of the Delemgan, Nature's Balm etc.) and only then rush into battle, swinging tusks left and right. And should Spieitshift end before the fight ends you can punch around with your meaty fists - or cast spells of course. Against crush-immune foes you can use a set of solid hatchets: they grant some deflection and deal slash damage - and they share the same weapon focus as fists. 99% of times you won't need them though. Since Novice's Suffering fists don't profit much from damage bonuses I skipped Savage Attack, Appr. Sneak Attack etc. and instead focused on Might, speed and lash improvement. Cheers and have fun!

Thank you Obsidian for the amazing content delivered from start to finish! We're all so grateful for the support you've offered since day one. I am proposing a way to balance unarmed combat in a way that will scale alongside the skill level and NG+ level of the player by returning Lil Fist's attributes to that of version 1.2.2 (infinite stacks, not 100, but lose them on hit) I've been a dedicated unarmed/fist user from the very beginning, and have seen it at its best and at its worst. As fists are now, it is impossible to tackle NG+ or the infected broodmother on base game with them. In 1.2.2, it was completely reasonable to defeat the IBM with fists so long as you could guard EVERYTHING. I believe this is the best way to go. Infinite stacks would also mean infinitely scaling damage to compete with even NG+4 bugs if you can survive long enough. With 1.4 being the final content update, unarmed weapons are out of the question. So many players love to play unarmed as it provides a ln interesting challenge. Please allow fists to compete with the other weapons!! What do you all think?

Finally got White March after waiting for Part 2, and decided to use my first party, with a Monk main character. What I discovered is an amazing synergy between unarmed attacks and the new Cipher spell Reaping Knives - namely the fact that they apparently benefit from unarmed damage boni, as seen here: This makes my Monk do absolutely bonkers damage while my Cipher pretty much generates more focus than she can reasonably spend. The best strategy for everything at that point seemed to be buffing the Monk as much as possible and just letting her take apart everything pretty much on her own. Note that this makes her do 100% raw damage, so the unarmed damage essentially gets transformed into raw. Just to be sure, I tested Reaping Knives on my Barbarian as well, and sure enough, they took over the slot from the equipped weapon, so it's not like they just add their raw damage on top of the equipped weapon. I assumed the Reaping Knives being affected by unarmed boni is not intended, but I went back to check the Accuracy breakdown - and lo and behold, Monks actually get double Weapon Focus boni here. Note that Reaping Knives apparently give you a Weapon Focus bonus even if you usually wouldn't get them for daggers, so long as you have any Weapon Focus talent at all. Here, however, they get it twice - my Monk has both WF: Peasant for the unarmed attack and WF: Ruffian for the secondary set of double stilettos. All of this leads me to believe that this is not merely an oversight or an unintended interaction, but actually designed so that Reaping Knives don't overwrite fists like other weapons, but rather get grafted onto them. adding their damage to the base damage of the fists and transforming it all into raw damage. If so, I very much like my monk being Godlike not just in appearance, but combat ability. tl;dr New Cipher spell Reaping Knives seems to stack with Monk's unarmed attacks, giving them super-strong raw damage fists

hi there. info: im playing a six man potd run of poe+wm1 (version 2.03). i retrained my former cc/tank monk to an unarmed dps monk. the resulting values i get from unarmed accuracy/damage are too good to be true compared to any other builds/classes i tried before (and i tried many). please see the added screenshots of the unbuffed monk (no potions/grp buffs etc active). btw if i switch to a superb weapon my accuracy drops by about 30, so its probably an unarmed bug. is that a known bug and how can i get rid off it (bc id really like to play an unarmed dps monk, but not an overpowered bugged one)? thanks in advance for any help

I understand from one of the recent Kickstart updates that grappling in combat has been ruled outside of the scope of the P:E design and will not be implemented. The reasons identified are very valid and are similar to those identified previously in other (pseudo)turn based rpg games: the cost (time and money) of having separate animations for just one design feature (one for a creature in the grappled condition and one for its regular, ungrappled token), and conceptually handling grappling certain creature types (how did he grapple a ghost/mustard jelly/carrion crawler/etc). These are just two of the reasons that grappling hasn't been implemented previously in rpgs; I'm sure there are others. 　 However, as both a professional software developer (C#/java) and a practitioner of taijutsu (a martial art that places strong emphasis on locks and to a minor extent, grappling) I couldn't help but begin jotting down some notes and thinking about a very rudimentary, high level design for how I would implement grappling as a viable option in P:E. Obviously, I'm posting this in the hopes that grappling will again be reviewed for possible inclusion in the P:E design document. Here goes. Assumption: both PCs and NPCs will have status' or conditions applied to them. Examples would include sleeping, sickened, prone, petrified, frightened, entangled, etc. These conditions will apply different modifiers to the creature's statistics, to include movement rate. Design option: 'Grappled' now becomes an additional condition that can be applied to a creature by another creature, with its own associated modifiers to a creature's statistics. Specifically, I'd expect it would take a creature's movement rate to 0, and depending on the skill level or abilities of the grappler (i.e. a master monk) it could inflict a Damage Over Time effect on the grappled creature. There would have to be a mechanic developed whereby every round/turn a grappled creature and a grappler determine if there is a change in their grappled/grappler status. Similarly, 'Grappler' or 'Grappling' becomes another condition that would be applied to a creature that is succesfully grappling another creature. Assumption: some of the above conditions (sleeping or prone, perhaps?) would entail displaying a separate animation for a creature that has that condition applied to them, a la Baldur's Gate and the Infinity Engine. Many creatures, while not being humanoid in form, will be immune to some of these conditions but others. A centaur, for example, could be put to sleep, but a ooze could not. This will require separate animations for some non humanoid creatures for certain conditions. Design option: Some of these alternate animations could be utilized for a creature in the grappled condition. Perhaps 'entangled' or 'prone', or something similar. This design works for nonhumanoids as well as humanoids. The centaur was going to have a scenario where it was entangled or put to sleep, yes? Use the same solution for the grappled condition. Design option #2: Just don't change the animation. A creature with the grappled condition has no change to its animation other than it doesn't go anywhere (movement rate set to 0). This one is easy peasy and wouldn't be too hard to swallow by the players either. Or put another way, it would be easier for players to swallow a system where they could grapple opponents, even if the grappled creature's animation didn't change, as opposed to no grappling system at all. Assumption: there will be a priority applied to these conditions determining what animation is being displayed for that creature. For example, prone or sleeping has a higher priority than frightened for what animation is displayed, while a truly terrible condition ( petrified or disintegrated, possibly) trumps them all for displayed animation. Design option: using the above design options, 'grappled' (and 'grappler' for that matter) simply becomes another condition with its own priority. A grappled creature has whatever animation is appropriate for that creature, but a grappled creature that is then killed from damage/put to sleep/disintegrated/what-have-you then assumes the animation of the (presumably) higher priority animation. So why go to the additional trouble of including grappling at all? After all, even if the design solution for animations was to not include any separate grappled animations (the creature just stops moving), there is still resource cost in developing the grappling system design, coding it, testing it, etc. Can't we just skip it and live with the traditional monk punching/kicking for unarmed combat? Sure you could..and then you'd be like every other run of the mill RPG that included unarmed combat (the truly bad ones don't even bother to make special allowances for it at all). Including some form of grappling combat in the system mechanics, regardless of the robustness (is that a word?) of how it's handled by the animation system, serves as yet another way that P:E is not only built upon the legacy of great isometric party-based RPGs, but is also raising the bar for them going forward. That last part is sort of a lofty, feel-good, tickle-fights and kitten-whispers benefit. It's hard to qualify and impossible to quantify as far as hard benefit to the overall P:E design document and project plan. In more concrete terms, including grappling as a viable combat option lends itself to satisfying players that have been looking for exactly that (and in this age of televised Mixed Martial Arts fights there are more of them than you might imagine), and it opens up a fascinating new combat strategy (grappling) that has rarely (if ever) been explored before, especially in the context of an isometric party based RPG. #tldr; There doesn't have to be any additional animation cost to include grappling in the P:E design doc, and there are solid benefits to the game as a whole by creating a grappling system and making it available to the PCs as well as the NPCs.