[CLASS BUILD] UPDATED - The Bleeding Arcanist 2.0

[trias10]

5 minutes ago, Not So Clever Hound said:

I think it would be Assassin/BM >>>> Vanishing Strike cheese + full-scale Bloodmage cheese = more potent cheese than the Pont L'évêque that I keep maturing at the bottom of my fridge. And I tell you this thing is potent enough to make my wife nearly faint every time she opens the refrigerator.

How does the Vanishing Strike cheese work? It only procs if you attack with a weapon, not a spell?

[Shai Hulud]

52 minutes ago, Not So Clever Hound said:

The time I bothered doing HoW with SC BM I did it with True Lover's Kiss then some good old buffing, Hard CC and Nuking on the second form et al. BUT... it was on standard PotD. It's one of those fights where the difference between standard and upscaled shifts the probabilities SIGNIFICANTLY in my opinion. Also, I wasn't playing with BPM at the time.

So, easy mode basically 

I was looking back through the thread and someone mentioned gloves that cast stasis shield. I was like what...don't remember that. Figure he meant the Gloves of the Dungeon Warden. Not a bad idea, 15s stun that targets will. With high intellect that should last about 30s. That might be enough to grind down one gigantic ooze from half health. Maybe. Very dicey though, blood mage spell accuracy is not that great I'm guessing it just misses about 40% of the time. Also it just takes one ooze to merge...or does the untargetable part of this prevent it? If so that is great, on some blood mage MC combos with higher accuracy I think you could reliably graze at least, especially if you're a boreal dwarf. Still leaves the problem of the massive oozes, I'm not 100% they can be damaged fast enough to stop the merges. The greater ones shouldn't be a problem, citzal's spirit lance + energized from ire of death's herald can finish them off. I think this might work with a battlemage or hierophant at least, given they can stack accuracy enough to at least graze with lockdown.

Non upscaled this will definitely work. 

52 minutes ago, dgray62 said:

You mean "Battlemage," right? Spellblade is rogue + wizard.

Yes I meant battlemage, there are too many subclasses and multiclasses for me to keep straight. I meant fighter/wizard. Both battlemage and spellblade sound to me like fighter/mage, I think a better name for rogue/wizard would be something like "arcane trickster" like used in pathfinder. Or "Sneaky Wiz". Patent Pending. 

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@trias10IMO blood mage / tactician for a first solo run. There's a reason two of the five first ultimate runs used tactician / x builds. You have so much flexibility for restoring resources and you won't get insta-zerged if you fail to do the blood mage setup for not dying, which is basically 

proc brilliant from fire blight, cast wall of draining, proc conduit, proc blade cascade, drink potion of final stand, cast wall of draining as necessary to keep self invulnerable, kill things, wet yourself at the sight of arcane dampener being cast

(You should enable Berath's Challenge in Magran's fires if playing blood mage / tactician to make brilliant tactician easier to proc, see Edit 2 at bottom)

Assassin / blood mage is super tedious because all you do is alpha strike then go invisible, alpha strike then go invisible, alpha strike then go invisible, and I think this only really works well if you have Berath's challenge NOT on, so you can flee combat repeatedly

If you get L8+ spells and want "ultimate power" use Major Grimoire Imprint to steal spells. Grab Enduring Shadows from Beina, a bunch of nice priest spells from her Goldpact priests, and grab Salvation of Time from Yseyr the Berathian. One of them has Barring Death's Door, not sure who.

Once you have Salvation of Time, you proc Blade Cascade for zero recovery, then proc or cast every buff you can think of (Barring Death's Door being the big one), and cast Salvation of Time over and over until the effects become permanent. Doesn't take that much real time once you have the spells. A few minutes in fast mode. The game will be really boring though.

Edit: Regarding the "7 grimoires"

This is because rogues have "deep pockets" skill which gives them six quick slots, but you can actually get to five quick slots without it using The Giftbearer's Cloth (probably the best cloak for a mage anyway) and you can get to six either using Extra Pockets from the Community Patch Mod (which I'd recommend, lots of little fixes and improvements), OR using Fleshmender armor (Ikorno bounty) with Poacher's Tackle upgrade. It's pretty decent armor actually.

That said... you do not need seven grimoires. For a spellcaster, if you memorize basically no spells you can still get nearly every unique spell and anything you'd want to cast from Arkemyr's Grimoire, Ninagauth's Teachings, Iron-clasped Grimoire, and Llengrath's Martial Mysteries. MAYBE you want to carry five, Jernaugh's Careful Calamities, which has a pretty nice opener and debuff "Jernaugh's Equalizing Burst". But like I usually don't carry Ninagauth because I only cast the Shadowflame as an opener and I prefer other spells usually. Pick and choose grimoires for the situation, I guarantee you there is no battle where you'd really benefit from carrying seven grimoires.

EDIT 2: Does blood mage / tactician require Berath's challenge for invisibility to trigger brilliant tactician? I always play with it on so I'm not really sure, I seem to recall someone mentioning it had some interaction with that challenge. 

Anyway it isn't much of a problem if you need to use Berath's Challenge, it mostly affects parties. If you're knocked out in combat for 10 seconds you're generally dead solo, regardless of Berath's Challenge, and the other aspect just prevents you from fleeing. Hmm yes now I think about it you would need Berath challenge actually for invisibility to always trigger brilliant tactician, because otherwise if you use say arkemyr's brilliant departure and go to the other side of the screen, then it just exits combat? 

If you want to go blood mage / tactician I'd recommend enabling Berath's challenge in Magran's Fires. This way you can get brilliant tactician from traditional flanking sources like blind (chill fog) but also potions of invisibility or arkemyr's brilliant departure. 

This post is a mess.

Edited March 12, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[trias10]

Thank you for the great detail, appreciate it, am learning a lot!

Quick question about Assassin/BM: wouldn't you run out of Guile in a fight by spamming the Rogue powers like Vanishing Strike and Shadowing Beyond? Assuming a long fight, eventually you wouldn't be able to go insta-invis anymore to get the Assassinate bonus? How do you keep the Guile flowing?

[Waski]

3 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

Still leaves the problem of the massive oozes, I'm not 100% they can be damaged fast enough to stop the merges

single class assassin can kill HoW (DoT for 1st stage, brilliant from Wit and Sacrifice + scrolls for rest)

[Shai Hulud]

14 minutes ago, Waski said:

single class assassin can kill HoW (DoT for 1st stage, brilliant from Wit and Sacrifice + scrolls for rest)

In this quote I was musing how to kill HOW as a blood mage or multiclass blood mage. May not have been clear. Also I meant without using the usual tricks of extending blade cascade and potions of final stand and whatnot. BPM constraints, more or less. 

brilliant from wit? Wit of death's herald. Assume sacrifice means marux amanth? I thought I mentioned that. Hmm yes...I did, though the post was pretty rambly. I just think assassin is boring as hell and have only played one for like half an hour. Stab things and run away. Or shoot things and run away. Fun.

I've managed to kill HOW with quite a few builds but have only found two that can also reliably kill the other megabosses. Not counting stabbing them with Lover's Embrace and running away. Or the blood mage wall of draining deification process. I'm experimenting with "legitimate" builds and strategies after having done all this the easy way. 

Your posts are quite terse yet packed with information. I kinda go the other way. Ramble for days and still leave you confused. 

[Shai Hulud]

1 hour ago, trias10 said:

Thank you for the great detail, appreciate it, am learning a lot!

Quick question about Assassin/BM: wouldn't you run out of Guile in a fight by spamming the Rogue powers like Vanishing Strike and Shadowing Beyond? Assuming a long fight, eventually you wouldn't be able to go insta-invis anymore to get the Assassinate bonus? How do you keep the Guile flowing?

If you're MC you don't, you use invisibility potion or arkemyr's brilliant departure or priest of skaen shadowing beyond to run away and they reset with berath challenge off. If SC you can do the same thing, but you can also theoretically use wall of flashing steel and gambit but it's kind of pointless, typically SC assassins are built with super low defenses and you'll get slaughtered if you actually try to fight. The whole strategy with assassin is go invis to reset the encounter and regain guile and more important the assassinate passive, then go attack, then repeat.

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Can somebody clarify how brilliant tactician interacts with invisibility? I just tried a tactician / blood mage with arkemyr's brilliant departure and it didn't seem to do anything. Yet I'm absolutely certain I've seen people do this with shadowing beyond in tactician / skaen builds. The spell description of arkemyr's brilliant departure says invisible, untargetable for X seconds. And you look invisible. But the spell sheet just says untargetable, so IDK, does it not with arkemyr's brilliant departure? 

EDIT: Nevermind, I think I figured it out, though I'd still appreciate confirmation.

If there is any kind of damage being done then you aren't considered invisible and brilliant won't trigger. Arkemyr's brilliant departure has an AOE confusion effect for 8s, then invisible/untargetable for 15s. Roughly double with high INT. So if the AOE confuse hits enemies this delays onset of brilliant, but you can just blood sacrifice and keep using arkemyr's brilliant departure to run away. Over 30s you replenish 5 spells so once you trigger brilliant tactician you get the spells back pretty quickly.

Edited March 12, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[dgray62]

56 minutes ago, trias10 said:

Quick question about Assassin/BM: wouldn't you run out of Guile in a fight by spamming the Rogue powers like Vanishing Strike and Shadowing Beyond? Assuming a long fight, eventually you wouldn't be able to go insta-invis anymore to get the Assassinate bonus? How do you keep the Guile flowing?

A spellblade doesn't need guile to go invisible. You can cast Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure unlimited times if you are a BM. For this reason, BM is by far the best subclass for spellblades. 

[trias10]

So it seems to me that Assassin/BM is still better than Tactician/BM once you get Brilliant Departure, and even with Berath's Challenge active:

You can use the Departure spell to essentially go invisible at will, and move to wherever you want on the battleground, and you're now invisible, which means your next spell will hit with the Assassinate bonus. I just tested this with Turn Based mode and it seems to work like this.

You don't need to run away from the battle at all, you can stay stuck in, you fire off some mega powerful spell from invis with the Assassinate buff, then you may get swarmed by hostiles, but it's okay, you just Brilliant Depart somewhere else, now you're invis again, fire off another nuke with Assassinate buff, rinse repeat.

It seems incredibly powerful, and you don't need the extra healing from Tactician to be able to stand your ground, because you can invis yourself in the middle of combat, which means you avoid getting hit in the first place.

Am I missing something? It seems very powerful and you can keep Berath's Challenge active, and you don't have to run away.

[Shai Hulud]

51 minutes ago, trias10 said:

So it seems to me that Assassin/BM is still better than Tactician/BM once you get Brilliant Departure, and even with Berath's Challenge active:

You can use the Departure spell to essentially go invisible at will, and move to wherever you want on the battleground, and you're now invisible, which means your next spell will hit with the Assassinate bonus. I just tested this with Turn Based mode and it seems to work like this.

You don't need to run away from the battle at all, you can stay stuck in, you fire off some mega powerful spell from invis with the Assassinate buff, then you may get swarmed by hostiles, but it's okay, you just Brilliant Depart somewhere else, now you're invis again, fire off another nuke with Assassinate buff, rinse repeat.

It seems incredibly powerful, and you don't need the extra healing from Tactician to be able to stand your ground, because you can invis yourself in the middle of combat, which means you avoid getting hit in the first place.

Am I missing something? It seems very powerful and you can keep Berath's Challenge active, and you don't have to run away.

 I'm playtesting a tactician/BM now and it is pretty ludicrous. It is simple to become straight invulnerable with monstrous defenses, but same is true of any blood mage I suppose, though tactician has some extra fightery stuff. The tactician can regen spells faster by proccing brilliant essentially at will, which also replenishes fighter resources. Unbending (shield for resolute), Refreshing Defense, Disciplined Strikes are instant activations and up more or less permanently. I figured out Mule Kick gets distributed by Citzal's spirit lance which has some hilarious results. You get back discipline on interrupt and mule kick interrupts on GRAZE, so you can just stand there spamming mule kick and laughing as five enemies fly into the air, you don't even need to recast anything besides wall of draining. And with confident aim, intuitive, conqueror stance and weapon mastery I'm not missing much. Also armored grace is a pretty large attack speed boost if wearing armor.

Assassinate passive is a net +5 accuracy, +4 penetration, +50% crit damage in comparison. The penetration and crit damage is pretty significant, though fighter does crit more often due to intuitive and can mass interrupt things at will, regens health and attacks faster. I guess it just depends on your playstyle. You do more damage on individual attacks with assassin/BM but you have to go invisible to regain the passive for ONE attack. With a tactician you go invisible and regain roughly 5 fighter resources and 5 wizard resources plus however many blood sacrifices you can throw into that period. Also much easier for you to die with assassin, either have to stealth strike and go insta-invis or use potions of final stand in any nontrivial encounter. 

If you like to do sneak spellstrikes assassin/bm is going to be more enjoyable for the high burst damage I guess. I like running into combat and mass mule kicking things. It makes me giggle. 

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I loaded my assassin and ran off with enduring shadows. Didn't get back any guile. I mean you don't need to get back guile to run off given arkemyr's brilliant departure but it does mean your rogue resources are finite. Though I'm playing with a bunch of magran's fire challenges including Berath's. I think without Berath challenge you can get guile back but I don't have any saves I can open to test that. 

Edited March 12, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[trias10]

Interesting. That is one thing I have noticed about the Assassin/BM -- they're very squishy. If all your buffs go down at the wrong moment, or even if they don't, you can get hit pretty hard. Although I'm not sure I understand exactly why the Tactician/BM is that much different, other than Unbending?

One thing I don't understand at all, how are you regenerating so many spell slots and Discipline every round? Can you please explain this in detail as I really don't understand when you say you're getting back 5 spell slots and 5 Discipline every round without even Blood Sacrifice.

[Shai Hulud]

15 minutes ago, trias10 said:

Interesting. That is one thing I have noticed about the Assassin/BM -- they're very squishy. If all your buffs go down at the wrong moment, or even if they don't, you can get hit pretty hard. Although I'm not sure I understand exactly why the Tactician/BM is that much different, other than Unbending?

One thing I don't understand at all, how are you regenerating so many spell slots and Discipline every round? Can you please explain this in detail as I really don't understand when you say you're getting back 5 spell slots and 5 Discipline every round without even Blood Sacrifice.

Unbending by itself can provide a ton of healing because of how it stacks, and Rapid Recovery is pretty significant particularly if you have Dawnstar's Blessing (about 13 health per 6 seconds), also am wearing Devil of Caroc armor that heals about 4 health per crit. But I don't just mean healing. Assassins take +15% damage from all sources, and blood mages have a -15 defense malus against bloodied or worse enemies. Tactician/BM has the same malus but it is easier to counter with refreshing defense and some small fighter bonuses from conqueror stance. There's also fearless etc. which I only take for certain encounters. It should be noted tactician gets confused and shaken when flanked, but this is fairly easily countered with immune to flanking gear like squid's grasp, which is good for caster's anyway because of the action speed buff. And Armored Grace provides -25% recovery also.

Are you playing turn based? I did see a tactician/skaen ultimate run that was turn based so should be possible but I have no experience with it. I may have misunderstood what you meant by round, though, maybe you just meant 6s? I'm going to proceed assuming you meant 6s in RTWP mode. Anyway you don't get back 5 resources per 6s, you get 1 resource per class per 6s for as long as brilliant tactician is procced, plus one immediately. The easiest way to proc it is to go invisible, and for a tactician/BM this is easiest with Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure. With starting 18 INT and good gear the invisible duration is about 30s. So if you proc brilliant tactician with Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure, you immediately get one resource per class, then every 6s another, so over the next 30s you should get 5 more for 6 total. It isn't instant though, I just cycle to fast mode while I'm standing there invisible and 30s passes in real time 15s I think. You can cast Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure again to get another 6, which should refill the fighter side and most of the wizard side unless you've cast a ton of spells. Unfortunately blood sacrifice does disrupt invisibility so you can't use that while regenerating from brilliant, but you can use it during combat once your defenses are up. Another thing to note about tactician is any source of interrupt can regen fighter resources, like the slicken spell, though it doesn't seem to proc consistently. I suspect only the first hit is checking whether there's an interrupt and giving resource return based on that. 

If you have the llengrath's martial masteries and arkemyr's grimoire you should start with llengrath and rapidly cast infuse with vital essence, deleterious alacrity, llengrath's displaced image, spirit shield or iron skin, arcane reflection, llengrath's safeguard, switch to arkemyr, I usually spam blood sacrifice while it is switching, then arcane veil from arkemyr's, followed by a well-placed wall of draining. Most of these bonuses stack making you pretty hard to hit and if you get even a few enemies with the wall of draining you can extend the effects as long as you put up a new wall every now and then. It also extends fighter buffs which are instant, plus rapid recovery. In difficult fights you'll want to use a potion of final stand which you can only use when near death, so after placing the wall I like to run off and use arkemyr's brilliant departure if needed to get far enough away I can safely blood sacrifice to near death and drink the potion. If the wall is hitting anything the short duration of final stand rapidly accumulates and you're invulnerable. But potions of final stand require quill leaves which are sorta rare so I wouldn't use them for standard fights. 

Getting into arguably "cheese" territory here, but you can also buff by proccing weapon effects before a fight, like Scordeo's Edge blade cascade, you can lure one enemy away from the group, cast essential phantom, and attack the phantom until it procs. Conduit can greatly improve your damage. From Deltro's Cage Helm. Stack +damage gear and hit yourself (hopefully crit) out of combat with a lightning spell (chain lightning is easiest), then switch gear, you have about 20s for the effect, run into combat and use wall of draining to extend, you can double or triple your damage output. With blade cascade and conduit both you can make it more like 10 to 15x. Once buffs are up you can either nuke or beat things with citzal's lance or concelhaut's parasitic quarterstaff. Usually prefer the lance unless things are resistant to pierce. 

Doing all this can eliminate the challenge for most fights (particularly the blade cascade + conduit combo) but in really tough fights (like hauni o whe and dorudugan) it is practically a necessity. Another great effect to extend is energized. If you get the slayer's claw in SSS you can get a might inspiration from any source, then quick switch to slayer's claw and it upgrades it one tier. So for instance Lover's Embrace dagger enchant lover's quarrel has a 33% on crit frenzy effect, you can lure a single enemy and attack a phantom until it procs, upgrade to energized with slayer's claw, and extend with wall of draining.

Hope this helps. You can do 99% of the content with either of these builds it's just a matter of playstyle. Assassin style is probably easier since you don't really need this buff routine with attack and vanish strat, but once you get the hang of it it isn't bad.

Also what's your stat spread? I'd use something like 9/12/15/19/18/3. Can flex on might/con/dex a couple points, but generally dex should be in the 12 to 16 range with the rest put towards might and con. If you use an assassin and are REALLY diligent about instantly going invisible so you never get hit you can dump CON more, and you probably don't need much DEX since you're mostly attacking from stealth I assume (which greatly reduces recovery), then immediately vanishing. In that case you could put more points into might.  

[trias10]

4 minutes ago, Shai Hulud said:

Unbending by itself can provide a ton of healing because of how it stacks, and Rapid Recovery is pretty significant particularly if you have Dawnstar's Blessing (about 13 health per 6 seconds), also am wearing Devil of Caroc armor that heals about 4 health per crit. But I don't just mean healing. Assassins take +15% damage from all sources, and blood mages have a -15 defense malus against bloodied or worse enemies. Tactician/BM has the same malus but it is easier to counter with refreshing defense and some small fighter bonuses from conqueror stance. There's also fearless etc. which I only take for certain encounters. It should be noted tactician gets confused and shaken when flanked, but this is fairly easily countered with immune to flanking gear like squid's grasp, which is good for caster's anyway because of the action speed buff. And Armored Grace provides -25% recovery also.

Are you playing turn based? I did see a tactician/skaen ultimate run that was turn based so should be possible but I have no experience with it. I may have misunderstood what you meant by round, though, maybe you just meant 6s? I'm going to proceed assuming you meant 6s in RTWP mode. Anyway you don't get back 5 resources per 6s, you get 1 resource per class per 6s for as long as brilliant tactician is procced, plus one immediately. The easiest way to proc it is to go invisible, and for a tactician/BM this is easiest with Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure. With starting 18 INT and good gear the invisible duration is about 30s. So if you proc brilliant tactician with Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure, you immediately get one resource per class, then every 6s another, so over the next 30s you should get 5 more for 6 total. It isn't instant though, I just cycle to fast mode while I'm standing there invisible and 30s passes in real time 15s I think. You can cast Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure again to get another 6, which should refill the fighter side and most of the wizard side unless you've cast a ton of spells. Unfortunately blood sacrifice does disrupt invisibility so you can't use that while regenerating from brilliant, but you can use it during combat once your defenses are up. Another thing to note about tactician is any source of interrupt can regen fighter resources, like the slicken spell, though it doesn't seem to proc consistently. I suspect only the first hit is checking whether there's an interrupt and giving resource return based on that. 

If you have the llengrath's martial masteries and arkemyr's grimoire you should start with llengrath and rapidly cast infuse with vital essence, deleterious alacrity, llengrath's displaced image, spirit shield or iron skin, arcane reflection, llengrath's safeguard, switch to arkemyr, I usually spam blood sacrifice while it is switching, then arcane veil from arkemyr's, followed by a well-placed wall of draining. Most of these bonuses stack making you pretty hard to hit and if you get even a few enemies with the wall of draining you can extend the effects as long as you put up a new wall every now and then. It also extends fighter buffs which are instant, plus rapid recovery. In difficult fights you'll want to use a potion of final stand which you can only use when near death, so after placing the wall I like to run off and use arkemyr's brilliant departure if needed to get far enough away I can safely blood sacrifice to near death and drink the potion. If the wall is hitting anything the short duration of final stand rapidly accumulates and you're invulnerable. But potions of final stand require quill leaves which are sorta rare so I wouldn't use them for standard fights. 

Getting into arguably "cheese" territory here, but you can also buff by proccing weapon effects before a fight, like Scordeo's Edge blade cascade, you can lure one enemy away from the group, cast essential phantom, and attack the phantom until it procs. Conduit can greatly improve your damage. From Deltro's Cage Helm. Stack +damage gear and hit yourself (hopefully crit) out of combat with a lightning spell (chain lightning is easiest), then switch gear, you have about 20s for the effect, run into combat and use wall of draining to extend, you can double or triple your damage output. With blade cascade and conduit both you can make it more like 10 to 15x. Once buffs are up you can either nuke or beat things with citzal's lance or concelhaut's parasitic quarterstaff. Usually prefer the lance unless things are resistant to pierce. 

Doing all this can eliminate the challenge for most fights (particularly the blade cascade + conduit combo) but in really tough fights (like hauni o whe and dorudugan) it is practically a necessity. Another great effect to extend is energized. If you get the slayer's claw in SSS you can get a might inspiration from any source, then quick switch to slayer's claw and it upgrades it one tier. So for instance Lover's Embrace dagger enchant lover's quarrel has a 33% on crit frenzy effect, you can lure a single enemy and attack a phantom until it procs, upgrade to energized with slayer's claw, and extend with wall of draining.

Hope this helps. You can do 99% of the content with either of these builds it's just a matter of playstyle. Assassin style is probably easier since you don't really need this buff routine with attack and vanish strat, but once you get the hang of it it isn't bad.

Ah yes, I only play Turn Based which maybe throws a spanner into the BM/Tactician approach.

I notice on the forum here that all the big TB players (Haplok, etc) all recommend Assassin/BM and not Tactician/BM which leads me to believe that the Tactician stuff you have so kindly written about doesn't work as well in TB.

[Shai Hulud]

2 hours ago, trias10 said:

Ah yes, I only play Turn Based which maybe throws a spanner into the BM/Tactician approach.

I notice on the forum here that all the big TB players (Haplok, etc) all recommend Assassin/BM and not Tactician/BM which leads me to believe that the Tactician stuff you have so kindly written about doesn't work as well in TB.

Never tried it, turn-based pillars is heresy as far as I'm concerned. 

Still, there has been only one ultimate submission using turn-based mode and he used a tactician/skaen. I figure the main difference from tactician/bm is he's using salvation of time rather than wall of draining to extend buffs, and he's using shadowing beyond instead of arkemyr's brilliant departure, but otherwise I expect it is pretty similar. Different buffs, barring death's door instead of potions of final stand but it's the same idea. I haven't had time to watch much of it but check out some of the combat videos. Zero assassin/anything submitted for ultimate. Probably due to vela, though it wouldn't be hard to protect her with a blood mage / assassin. 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqC3iYYkToNODONcafmJILEcSvOIw9etc

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Actually I decided to try turn base mode and it works pretty much the same but appears significantly easier, at least from my couple hours of testing. The fast wizard casts are free actions. Blood sacrifice is a free action. So you can start an encounter in stealth approach, drop a wall of draining, then on your turn, cast every buff in Llengrath's Martial Masteries and any you have memorized (besides Llengrath's Safeguard), cast blood sacrifice on yourself until you are near death, fire your fighter buffs which are also free actions, and drink a potion of final stand as a standard action. Since the wall of draining was already up, you're invulnerable with zero risk. You can also move ridiculously far every turn.

Plus, enemies don't seem to move around much making placing the walls much easier. In particular they don't seem to chase you when you use Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure. And they never tried to flank me, which was kind of amazing.

Brilliant Tactician proc is similar to RTWP except because the enemies don't chase you, you're likely to land a bunch of wall of draining hits and greatly extend your invisibility. Unbending seems to heal more per round, though I'm not sure how you'd stack it to the obscene amounts possible in RTWP. I quickly got 4 stacks for passive healing of about 70 per round, and it seemed to stay around there even when hit later. While waiting for my mule kicks to replenish, I completely healed from 1 HP. You get 2 resources in the first round no enemy is confused, then 1 round every round after, including after I launched a new wall of draining and used blood sacrifice.

Also, all "cast" length spells take the same time to cast. So a fireball is the same as Ninagauth's Shadowflame, making long casts like summons and the shadowflame more attractive. I'm frankly not sure what the "rapid casting" and "martial casting" abilities do though I'd taken both...

Some things I'm not sure about...I didn't test kiting, unsure if you can draw out one enemy for the purpose of proccing some effect like blade cascade, though it wouldn't have been hard in this fight, it just would take a long time. Combat is much slower even at the highest speed compared to RTWP on slow. 

And you can see the enemy's intended actions! While fighting Hauni O Whe this was super useful since it says "merge" or "symbiote" etc. In RTWP you get icons, which can be hard to catch if there are a bunch of little oozes and a couple big ones, and with Magran's challenge you can't pause at all. In turn based Magran's challenge gives you 10 seconds per turn which seems WAY more than enough, particularly since you can pseudo-pause by checking your inventory screen.

So turn based seems easier, however, it seems like it would take hundreds of hours to get through all the content in turn based mode, and I don't know if it's worth it.

I also tried turn-based mode with an assassin/blood mage but I couldn't really figure it out. I was taking so much damage with no healing the only way to survive seems to have a potion of final stand, or kite enemies one on one if that is possible. While Shadowing Beyond was a free action, Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure is a standard action, so the cycle of attack, flee, attack can take several rounds especially if you don't have many spells memorized and need to switch because grimoire cooldown takes a round. Most importantly I couldn't both cast a spell and then flee the same turn, though you could do this in RTWP (I think) if you start the battle from stealth, and you can always run while a spell is in cooldown. I couldn't figure out how to flee the battle, even tried turning Berath challenge off. It might have been because I was testing on a megaboss map and those fights could be treated differently, IDK. Or I just don't know what I'm doing with assassins. The spell penetration bonus from assassinate is very nice though, I can definitely see the appeal for just nuking things to oblivion. The weapon penetration bonus is also nice, but with well chosen mythic weapons and good ol' fists plus (if necessary) haymaker and/or tenacious/energized, it isn't really necessary, as you typically have sufficient weapon pen with mythic + tenacious/energized and if necessary haymaker or rending blows.

So...I'm sticking to my analysis that blood mage / tactician is an excellent choice for the whacking things with a stick approach, while blood mage / assassin is preferable for nuking. 

Edited March 13, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[trias10]

21 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

Never tried it, turn-based pillars is heresy as far as I'm concerned. 

Still, there has been only one ultimate submission using turn-based mode and he used a tactician/skaen. I figure the main difference from tactician/bm is he's using salvation of time rather than wall of draining to extend buffs, and he's using shadowing beyond instead of arkemyr's brilliant departure, but otherwise I expect it is pretty similar. Different buffs, barring death's door instead of potions of final stand but it's the same idea. I haven't had time to watch much of it but check out some of the combat videos. Zero assassin/anything submitted for ultimate. Probably due to vela, though it wouldn't be hard to protect her with a blood mage / assassin. 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqC3iYYkToNODONcafmJILEcSvOIw9etc

-----------

Actually I decided to try turn base mode and it works pretty much the same but appears significantly easier, at least from my couple hours of testing. The fast wizard casts are free actions. Blood sacrifice is a free action. So you can start an encounter in stealth approach, drop a wall of draining, then on your turn, cast every buff in Llengrath's Martial Masteries and any you have memorized (besides Llengrath's Safeguard), cast blood sacrifice on yourself until you are near death, fire your fighter buffs which are also free actions, and drink a potion of final stand as a standard action. Since the wall of draining was already up, you're invulnerable with zero risk. You can also move ridiculously far every turn.

Plus, enemies don't seem to move around much making placing the walls much easier. In particular they don't seem to chase you when you use Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure. And they never tried to flank me, which was kind of amazing.

Brilliant Tactician proc is similar to RTWP except because the enemies don't chase you, you're likely to land a bunch of wall of draining hits and greatly extend your invisibility. Unbending seems to heal more per round, though I'm not sure how you'd stack it to the obscene amounts possible in RTWP. I quickly got 4 stacks for passive healing of about 70 per round, and it seemed to stay around there even when hit later. While waiting for my mule kicks to replenish, I completely healed from 1 HP. You get 2 resources in the first round no enemy is confused, then 1 round every round after, including after I launched a new wall of draining and used blood sacrifice.

Also, all "cast" length spells take the same time to cast. So a fireball is the same as Ninagauth's Shadowflame, making long casts like summons and the shadowflame more attractive. I'm frankly not sure what the "rapid casting" and "martial casting" abilities do though I'd taken both...

Some things I'm not sure about...I didn't test kiting, unsure if you can draw out one enemy for the purpose of proccing some effect like blade cascade, though it wouldn't have been hard in this fight, it just would take a long time. Combat is much slower even at the highest speed compared to RTWP on slow. 

And you can see the enemy's intended actions! While fighting Hauni O Whe this was super useful since it says "merge" or "symbiote" etc. In RTWP you get icons, which can be hard to catch if there are a bunch of little oozes and a couple big ones, and with Magran's challenge you can't pause at all. In turn based Magran's challenge gives you 10 seconds per turn which seems WAY more than enough, particularly since you can pseudo-pause by checking your inventory screen.

So turn based seems easier, however, it seems like it would take hundreds of hours to get through all the content in turn based mode, and I don't know if it's worth it.

I also tried turn-based mode with an assassin/blood mage but I couldn't really figure it out. I was taking so much damage with no healing the only way to survive seems to have a potion of final stand, or kite enemies one on one if that is possible. While Shadowing Beyond was a free action, Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure is a standard action, so the cycle of attack, flee, attack can take several rounds especially if you don't have many spells memorized and need to switch because grimoire cooldown takes a round. Most importantly I couldn't both cast a spell and then flee the same turn, though you could do this in RTWP (I think) if you start the battle from stealth, and you can always run while a spell is in cooldown. I couldn't figure out how to flee the battle, even tried turning Berath challenge off. It might have been because I was testing on a megaboss map and those fights could be treated differently, IDK. Or I just don't know what I'm doing with assassins. The spell penetration bonus from assassinate is very nice though, I can definitely see the appeal for just nuking things to oblivion. The weapon penetration bonus is also nice, but with well chosen mythic weapons and good ol' fists plus (if necessary) haymaker and/or tenacious/energized, it isn't really necessary, as you typically have sufficient weapon pen with mythic + tenacious/energized and if necessary haymaker or rending blows.

So...I'm sticking to my analysis that blood mage / tactician is an excellent choice for the whacking things with a stick approach, while blood mage / assassin is preferable for nuking. 

Thank you most kindly for all of that, it was super helpful. Also didn't know about that Ultimate build in turn-based, that was very cool to watch in action.

I went ahead and did a few test battles in solo turn based using the Tactician/BM, and was able to replicate much of what you mentioned. However, one key thing I'm not seeing on my side is the ease of getting Brilliant to proc from Brilliant Tactician. You wrote that you can get it to proc simply by going invisible using Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure, however I am not seeing that. Going invis alone isn't causing the Brilliant to proc, which makes sense, because all enemies must be flanked for it to proc. The only way I can get all enemies to be flanked is with Chill Fog. So unlike you, I found myself starved of Discipline in most fights. I'll add that I wasn't using any special gear, just some non-magical crap.

How are you getting Brilliant from Brilliant Tactician to proc so reliably?

I do believe you now that Tactician/BM is much more survivable for solo than Assassin/BM. For my POTD playthrough, it's now a choice between battlemage vs SC Bloodmage.

You reckon those extra +3 PL are worth giving up Tactician for?

[Shai Hulud]

8 hours ago, trias10 said:

Thank you most kindly for all of that, it was super helpful. Also didn't know about that Ultimate build in turn-based, that was very cool to watch in action.

I went ahead and did a few test battles in solo turn based using the Tactician/BM, and was able to replicate much of what you mentioned. However, one key thing I'm not seeing on my side is the ease of getting Brilliant to proc from Brilliant Tactician. You wrote that you can get it to proc simply by going invisible using Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure, however I am not seeing that. Going invis alone isn't causing the Brilliant to proc, which makes sense, because all enemies must be flanked for it to proc. The only way I can get all enemies to be flanked is with Chill Fog. So unlike you, I found myself starved of Discipline in most fights. I'll add that I wasn't using any special gear, just some non-magical crap.

How are you getting Brilliant from Brilliant Tactician to proc so reliably?

I do believe you now that Tactician/BM is much more survivable for solo than Assassin/BM. For my POTD playthrough, it's now a choice between battlemage vs SC Bloodmage.

You reckon those extra +3 PL are worth giving up Tactician 

You want berath's challenge on. I'm not sure why invisibility satisfies the flanking condition but it does. Maybe because the enemies can't see you they're considered "blind" to you and flanked is a subcondition of blind. If berath is off then i guess the battle eventually ends while you're invisible and you lose your buffs. The invisibility / Brilliant interaction is well known but kind of esoteric as to why it works.

It should be noted Brilliant tactician won't be procced if enemies are attacking each other so you may have to skip a few rounds if you confused them with ABD

Also you have to be solo. Theoretically it could work in a party if everyone were invisible.

Watch the tactician/skaen during megaboss battles and you'll see him proc brilliant with shadowing beyond because that's the only way to get back resources.

IMO the only reason to go pure blood mage on potd upscale solo is Major Grimoire Imprint which can be (ab)used to permanently steal spells. Though I've tried this and the game gets pretty dull when you have free casts of shadowing beyond, barring death's door, salvation of time etc. Also very tedious stealing spells because there are 7 spell tiers it affects and most enemy casters have 2 or 3 spells per level so it can take a LONG time to get a particular spell. Minor Grimoire Imprint can also steal spells in a much less game breaking way. And it works better since it only targets tiers 1 to 3 so odds of getting a spell you're seeking are over twice as high. Escape, Nature's Balm, The Moon's Light, druid chill fog are all nice spells to steal. But im getting off topic.

So yes you get bonus PL with SC which could be worth if it if you're just nuking things...and since blood sacrifice is a free action you can restore unlimited spells per turn if you are protected by a potion of final stand at least. Without the potion your survivability will be pretty bad unless you abuse temporal cocoon. To do that you need highish resolve, cast temporal cocoon on yourself, then when the paralysis ends you extend the untargetable part with wall of draining which makes you basically invincible.

In turn based I think melee attacks are even better since they're just standard actions, so you can do a mule kick with citzal's spirit Lance then switch grimoires if you need to throw up a wall of draining or use ABD next turn. It's annoying that "cast" length actions like most damage spells you have to end turn before they cast, which makes switching grimoires harder due to the cooldown. Of course with SC blood mage you could memorize most of what you want to cast and just not switch grimoires. 

You can definitely make either work. But...

If it were me I'd go multiclass mostly because 7 levels of another class is worth more than level 8 and 9 spells. This is particularly true with wizards since you don't actually need to memorize anything. 

Only spell I'd be tempted to memorize is wall of draining and maybe pull of eora. Then carry llengrath, arkemyr (mostly these two), plus whatever damage grimoires you want. Ninagauth and Ironclasped are good choices and have just about everything you'd want (besides wall of draining and pull of eora). WOD is in jernaugh's careful calamities which is also a nice grimoire for jernaugh's equalizing burst.

Can't overstate how good wall of draining is. How often you need to cast it depends on how many enemies you hit and how many buffs they have, you can track on your character sheet how many rounds you have left for given effects, you'll get a feel for how often to cast the wall to keep up the buffs. It extends weapon and item procs and potion effects as well as spell effects, so there's a ton you can do with it.

[trias10]

6 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

You want berath's challenge on. I'm not sure why invisibility satisfies the flanking condition but it does. Maybe because the enemies can't see you they're considered "blind" to you and flanked is a subcondition of blind. If berath is off then i guess the battle eventually ends while you're invisible and you lose your buffs. The invisibility / Brilliant interaction is well known but kind of esoteric as to why it works.

It should be noted Brilliant tactician won't be procced if enemies are attacking each other so you may have to skip a few rounds if you confused them with ABD

Also you have to be solo. Theoretically it could work in a party if everyone were invisible.

Watch the tactician/skaen during megaboss battles and you'll see him proc brilliant with shadowing beyond because that's the only way to get back resources.

IMO the only reason to go pure blood mage on potd upscale solo is Major Grimoire Imprint which can be (ab)used to permanently steal spells. Though I've tried this and the game gets pretty dull when you have free casts of shadowing beyond, barring death's door, salvation of time etc. Also very tedious stealing spells because there are 7 spell tiers it affects and most enemy casters have 2 or 3 spells per level so it can take a LONG time to get a particular spell. Minor Grimoire Imprint can also steal spells in a much less game breaking way. And it works better since it only targets tiers 1 to 3 so odds of getting a spell you're seeking are over twice as high. Escape, Nature's Balm, The Moon's Light, druid chill fog are all nice spells to steal. But im getting off topic.

So yes you get bonus PL with SC which could be worth if it if you're just nuking things...and since blood sacrifice is a free action you can restore unlimited spells per turn if you are protected by a potion of final stand at least. Without the potion your survivability will be pretty bad unless you abuse temporal cocoon. To do that you need highish resolve, cast temporal cocoon on yourself, then when the paralysis ends you extend the untargetable part with wall of draining which makes you basically invincible.

In turn based I think melee attacks are even better since they're just standard actions, so you can do a mule kick with citzal's spirit Lance then switch grimoires if you need to throw up a wall of draining or use ABD next turn. It's annoying that "cast" length actions like most damage spells you have to end turn before they cast, which makes switching grimoires harder due to the cooldown. Of course with SC blood mage you could memorize most of what you want to cast and just not switch grimoires. 

You can definitely make either work. But...

If it were me I'd go multiclass mostly because 7 levels of another class is worth more than level 8 and 9 spells. This is particularly true with wizards since you don't actually need to memorize anything. 

Only spell I'd be tempted to memorize is wall of draining and maybe pull of eora. Then carry llengrath, arkemyr (mostly these two), plus whatever damage grimoires you want. Ninagauth and Ironclasped are good choices and have just about everything you'd want (besides wall of draining and pull of eora). WOD is in jernaugh's careful calamities which is also a nice grimoire for jernaugh's equalizing burst.

Can't overstate how good wall of draining is. How often you need to cast it depends on how many enemies you hit and how many buffs they have, you can track on your character sheet how many rounds you have left for given effects, you'll get a feel for how often to cast the wall to keep up the buffs. It extends weapon and item procs and potion effects as well as spell effects, so there's a ton you can do with it.

Interesting, very odd that invisibility wasn't firing Brilliant for me, even though I was solo. I didn't have Berath's challenge on though, so perhaps that was why, or it may have been that the enemies were confused from the ABD. I will check again later today using a potion of invis instead.

You mention you can use grimoire imprint to steal Shadowing Beyond, but SB is an ability, not a spell, so how can you steal it? Also, why would you need Salvation of Time when Wall of Draining seems just as good if not even better? Barring Deaths Door I totally understand.

Finally, last question, but for Tactician is Disciplined Strikes better than Tactical Barrage? Disciplined Strikes gives you Intuitive, which converts 25% of hits to crits, but Tactical Barrage gives you Acute, which seems far more powerful with +5 Intellect and +1 Power Levels.

[Elric Galad]

2 hours ago, trias10 said:

You mention you can use grimoire imprint to steal Shadowing Beyond, but SB is an ability, not a spell, so how can you steal it? 

It is a spell for Skaen priest.

2 hours ago, trias10 said:

Finally, last question, but for Tactician is Disciplined Strikes better than Tactical Barrage? Disciplined Strikes gives you Intuitive, which converts 25% of hits to crits, but Tactical Barrage gives you Acute, which seems far more powerful with +5 Intellect and +1 Power Levels.

Tactician can get Brilliant from their passive, which is better than Acute. Intuitive is less redundant.

In general Tactical Barrage has more raw power than Displined Strike... But Disciplined Strike fits better in the majority of build because you can get INT inspiration from other sources.

[trias10]

So I tried again with potion of invisibility, but still no dice, it doesn't get Brilliant Tactician to process. Maybe Community Patch or BMP (just the buffs) fixed it? Because to be honest, it's a bug and shouldn't be happening anyway. Brilliant Tactician states that it only applies if all enemies are flanked, and invisibility does not make that happen, so what I'm seeing should be the default and correct behaviour. I am playing in turn based. However, Chill Fog makes everyone flanked, so it's a cheap and easy way to get Brilliant to proc, although in a huge fight it may be a problem. I'm actually happy that invisibility doesn't proc Brilliant as otherwise it's too cheesy and trivial to abuse. However, it also cuts down on the utility of Tactician and makes SC blood mage more alluring.

 

[NotDumbEnough]

You need Berath's Challenge enabled to proc Brilliant, or else going invisible with the whole party causes the enemy to disengage and the fight will end after a while.

[Shai Hulud]

On 3/14/2023 at 1:45 PM, trias10 said:

So I tried again with potion of invisibility, but still no dice, it doesn't get Brilliant Tactician to process. Maybe Community Patch or BMP (just the buffs) fixed it? Because to be honest, it's a bug and shouldn't be happening anyway. Brilliant Tactician states that it only applies if all enemies are flanked, and invisibility does not make that happen, so what I'm seeing should be the default and correct behaviour. I am playing in turn based. However, Chill Fog makes everyone flanked, so it's a cheap and easy way to get Brilliant to proc, although in a huge fight it may be a problem. I'm actually happy that invisibility doesn't proc Brilliant as otherwise it's too cheesy and trivial to abuse. However, it also cuts down on the utility of Tactician and makes SC blood mage more alluring.

 

So I just recorded a video with Nvidia Shadowplay of me blind soloing the trial of the naga in turn based mode with tactician/blood mage. It was 51 minutes long because I'm bad at turn based, and when I go to upload the video, it is black. The sound is there but no video. Which is rather irritating. You're just going to have to trust me that invisibility procs brilliant tactician.

But Berath's Challenge has to be on, and even then in turn-based it doesn't proc immediately. I was going to review the video to get an exact delay but can't do that now. I'm pretty sure it is 4 rounds though. So your potion of invisibility likely doesn't proc it because your alchemy isn't high enough for the effect to last that long. Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure lasts long enough, though you get way more mileage if you throw down a wall of draining the round before you use ABD. Then you skip 4 rounds, and you get 2 resources back on the first round and 1 every round after. It's less tedious in RTWP because you don't have to sit there and wait for the enemy to do nothing, you just run away and a little while later you get brilliant. Actually I'm not even sure there's a wait in RTWP....

There are some additional caveats, like you can't be damaging the enemy or have enacted abilities that CAN damage the enemy. This includes things as innocuous as a flame shield even if it isn't hurting the enemy at the moment. My experience with flame shield is you still proc one round of brilliant to restore 2 resources but then you lose the invisibility. Same is true if there's a DOT or a pulse spell like chill fog going off while you're invisible. 

What I think's going on, and this makes sense why this only works with Berath, is the game gives you 4 rounds of invisibility before assuming you've "fled" and normally the battle ends. With Berath on, after those 4 rounds the battle doesn't end, and for some weird esoteric reason all enemies are considered flanked at that point as long as you're invisible. 

You don't need to spam ABD like with an assassin though. I only used it twice in the trial of the naga fight, and didn't really need to use it the second, was just restoring my resources because I had Woedica on. It's good to use after the first time your resources are depleted, but by that point you should have a LOT of buffs and passive healing from Unbending. I was getting a couple hundred in healing per round by the first use of ABD, and 3/4 through the fight was healing more every round than I had in health. I could have used a potion of final stand and made it super easy mode, but reptilian blood is sort of limited, can probably make like 30 I'd guess? Maybe more, not sure, never really used them. You definitely want them for megabosses. Some people consider the trial of the naga fight very difficult but I think you have enough other tools you don't need it. 

Also in turn based pay attention to when enemies are about to cast spells or use abilities because that's an easy free mule kick. You don't seem to get the discipline back when you just interrupt a melee attack, even if it says "interrupt" in the log. Seems like it has to be an active ability or spell. Charge is also useful as a movement ability and interrupts on hit, though is kind of expensive at 2 discipline and you just get back 1 on successful interrupt I think. But it hard stuns, so still a good ability.

Chill Fog is of course a great way to proc brilliant on smaller groups of enemies but sometimes you run into big groups where you'll need to stack several of them or they might be resistant to perception afflictions (one of the more rare resistances but it's out there). Also enemies weak to perception afflictions like one of the naga types in SSS get blinded by mule kicks which is pretty awesome. I mass blinded several of them since I was using citzal's spirit lance.

And carry around squid's grasp or kapana taga so you don't get flanked in the beginning of fights, then summon citzal's spirit lance when you have enough buffs up and resources restores that you don't really care if you get shaken/confused. Confused is easy to get rid of with Infuse Vital Essence. Shaken is a little harder but you can wear the cap of the laughingstock which is really good for a blood mage anyway (helps with wall of draining, it's counted towards something to drain on enemies because it's part buff part debuff), and/or upgrade to unbending shield instead of unbending trunk. Unbending shield gives resolute which is nice. And you get so many stacks of unbending I don't think the extra 8% in unbending trunk is worth losing resolute. 

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And to answer your earlier post, wall of draining is probably better than salvation of time as a spell when you have only 1 or 2 of them to cast, but wall of draining is not better than FREE salvation of time. When you permanently steal a spell it is free to cast, forever. Definitely an abusive mechanic but fun. The way to steal a spell is kind of complicated. You need a grimoire with minor or major grimoire imprint (don't memorize it). Aloths' grimoire has minor imprint, easiest one to get. Arkemyr's Illuminating Discoveries and Jernaugh's Careful Calamities are two of the unique spellbooks that have Major Imprint. Anway you cast minor/major imprint from the grimoire against an enemy spellcaster. It rolls vs fortitude so it can be hard to hit, but a graze counts. The best way to do it is kite individual spellcasters and then you go imprint imprint / blood sacrifice to get them back, heal as necessary, repeat. When you get a spell you want just switch grimoires and it's now permanently in your grimoire if you didn't already have it memorized. So if you steal arcane veil for instance it just shows up in your level 2 casts and costs nothing to cast it. If you steal priest or druid spells they show up on the quick item bar and you do eventually run out of space, so you can steal as many wizard spells as you want but only like 12ish druid and priest spells before the bar goes off the end of the screen. 

Taking minor grimoire imprints is fun IMO, Escape (priests of skaen have it) lets you zip around the battlefield. Major imprints are pretty gamebreaking when you have endless casts of salvation of time, barring death's door, and various damaging wizard spells. Although, because in turn based blood sacrifice is a free action, and most of the wizard spells you want to imprint are "free" casts, there isn't nearly as much of a difference as in RTWP. In turn based you effectively have infinite wizard spells as long as the blood sacrifice doesn't kill you, which it can't if you've used and extended a potion of final stand.

I minor imprint a bunch of spells in the biakara and beina encounters but it is pretty tedious getting them sometimes because the spell you get is chosen randomly from their spell list, so you could have to cast 50 times to get a spell you're looking for. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jyHx0W3zSM&list=PLkOCqAbkQHxwTJyCKvA_31wYyPWK_87VY&index=13

Oh and Disciplined Strikes >> Tactical Barrage in like 90% of cases IMO, mostly because 25% hit to crit is really strong on top of aware, and intelligence buffs aren't hard to find even if acute is. The wizard has Infuse with vital essence which has crazy long duration fit + smart, so in this case you definitely want strikes. 

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One more thing, with practice I'm finding you don't even really need ABD in many fights. Nearly every enemy can be interrupted (one major exception, Dorudugan...) and with tactician interrupt restores discipline. You have to interrupt an ability or spell, standard weapon attacks don't count. So obviously there's mule kick which returns 1 making it free, but many wizard spells proc interrupts reliably. AOEs like Slicken are especially good. Chill Fog interrupts on crits, not as reliable, but has the benefit of sometimes proccing Brilliant Tactician as well. And Concelhaut's Crushing Doom is almost guaranteed to proc multiple interrupts. So you can blood sacrifice on the wizard side, using your insane healing from unbending (or potions of final stand) to restore tons of spells, and as long as you're casting spells like slicken, chill fog, CCD, and throwing an occasional wall of draining you're nearly invulnerable and renewing fighter resources pretty fast. Mule Kick and Charge are the only ones you'd really need to use anyway, and they cost 1 and 2 so it is pretty easy to use mule kick for most of your attacks once you figure out how to keep the interrupts up on the wizard side. The more I practice with tactician/blood mage the less I use ABD. It's good to use near the beginning of a fight when you've put up all your buffs and missing a lot of resources and don't have ton of unbending yet, but after that you'd rarely need it. I see it more as a panic button, for those times when you do manage to get near death without a potion of final stand, can ABD to escape and not only restore resources but fully heal you from unbending.

And you might want to chew svef. Gives resistance to intellect, perception, and resolve afflictions as well as a perception boost, which makes you immune to the worst aspects of tactical dilemma when you get flanked (when not immune to flanking from weapon) since confuse and shaken are tier 1 afflictions they get bumped down to nothing. To avoid the drug crash just use it in a fight with tons of enemies, and once you're basically unkillable just keep laying down walls of draining to extend the effect. It is pretty easy to get it to practically permanent duration. You can stack other drugs too but you have to be careful to watch for arcane dampeners, since there is a bug where arcane dampener correctly removes the drug bonus and correctly causes a drug crash, but incorrectly leaves the drug crash once arcane dampener ends and the drug effect resumes. You should be watching for arcane dampener anyway since it removes all your buffs. But it is easy to spot in turn based if someone is casting it, and in that case just go mule kick them. 

Alternatively, wild orlan gives resistance to resolve afflictions (good race choice for stats also), and devil of caroc breastplate with mechanical mind gives resistance to intellect (also really good armor regardless). Take devil's due on DOCBP.

Edited March 16, 2023 by Shai Hulud
Typo

[trias10]

Wow, thank you for all of that, that is a huge amount of info to take in!

I started my POTD run with a Tactician/BM and so far it's going well, am level 16, but I haven't taken Mule Kick at all, as I want to focus on spells, but you seem to praise it so highly. I just don't have the ability points to spare for it though, maybe I can take it later.

One thing I'm a bit hazy on is how you're getting so much healing going per round, in Turn Based, using Unbending. I've been in several fights now, and I haven't noticed that I'm getting any meaningful healing like the kind you are describing. I have Unbending which I activate at the beginning of the combat, but I am not seeing the numbers you are describing. I am buffing myself with loads of spells though, so I usually don't even get hit by the enemy, unless they cast spells. However, I did go fight Dorudugan (the giant steel megaboss), and I figured I could win given all this Unbending stuff, but nope, I died pretty quickly after he smashed me with his main attack several times. Should I be activating Unbending multiple times per fight or something? (For a stack effect?)

Brilliant Tactician remains difficult to proc, usually only from Chill Fog reliably, I don't have ABD yet so can't comment on the invisibility. Overall, am not really getting a sense that the Tactician/BM is any better than a SC Bloodmage. I'm more jealous of Aloth and his ability to cast level 8 spells which seem much harder hitting than anything I can put out.

[dgray62]

I

On 3/18/2023 at 2:02 PM, trias10 said:

I started my POTD run with a Tactician/BM and so far it's going well, am level 16, but I haven't taken Mule Kick at all, as I want to focus on spells, but you seem to praise it so highly. I just don't have the ability points to spare for it though, maybe I can take it later.

Keep in mind that for Wizard, you really don't need to select spells at all when you level up. You can just rely on grimoires, or, if you're not opposed to a bit of cheese, use the grimoire switching trick to permanently steal all the spells that you want. Then when you level up you can always select fighter abilities. When you have to select wizard abilities at level 1, 4, 7, etc., you can pick common abilities like weapon and shield style or the important wizard passives like the elemental pen. bonuses, spell shaping, and so forth. Once you've put in 1000+ hours into the game, as many of us still lurking in this forum have, it can be a fun challenge to steal the spells you really need from the game's encounters with wizards and wizard multi class builds. For example, just yesterday, while clearing out the old Neketaka ruins with a 20th level party on PotD upscaled, I managed to steal Concelhaut's Crushing Doom from one of the skeletal mages/skeletal sorcerers/risen mages that lurk down there. This was a pleasant surprise as I've never gotten that spell from one of them before.

Edited March 19, 2023 by dgray62
Additional information

[Shai Hulud]

On 3/18/2023 at 4:02 PM, trias10 said:

Wow, thank you for all of that, that is a huge amount of info to take in!

I started my POTD run with a Tactician/BM and so far it's going well, am level 16, but I haven't taken Mule Kick at all, as I want to focus on spells, but you seem to praise it so highly. I just don't have the ability points to spare for it though, maybe I can take it later.

One thing I'm a bit hazy on is how you're getting so much healing going per round, in Turn Based, using Unbending. I've been in several fights now, and I haven't noticed that I'm getting any meaningful healing like the kind you are describing. I have Unbending which I activate at the beginning of the combat, but I am not seeing the numbers you are describing. I am buffing myself with loads of spells though, so I usually don't even get hit by the enemy, unless they cast spells. However, I did go fight Dorudugan (the giant steel megaboss), and I figured I could win given all this Unbending stuff, but nope, I died pretty quickly after he smashed me with his main attack several times. Should I be activating Unbending multiple times per fight or something? (For a stack effect?)

Brilliant Tactician remains difficult to proc, usually only from Chill Fog reliably, I don't have ABD yet so can't comment on the invisibility. Overall, am not really getting a sense that the Tactician/BM is any better than a SC Bloodmage. I'm more jealous of Aloth and his ability to cast level 8 spells which seem much harder hitting than anything I can put out.

Dorudugan at L16 is probably impossible. You'll definitely need wall of draining and probably potion of final stand as well. Unbending won't do you much good against one really strong enemy like Dorudugan because your healing on the first few rounds is lower and you'll get killed. Even with potion of final stand dorudugan is going to be very very challenging solo because he heals himself faster than you can damage him unless you've procced a high damage conduit crit from deltro's cage helm.

Once you get wall of draining you only need to cast unbending once. If you recast it the effect doesn't stack, what happens is you just refresh the duration. Unbending stacks with itself every time you're hit. You'll see in the character sheet it will say something like "unbending (x10): X health over Y rounds" but it actually applies X health every round. Spells should apply to unbending but some abilities don't proc correctly so maybe some don't. I'm away from home so can't check spell interaction atm. In general though, you won't get much healing if you aren't being hit. Also without wall of draining unbending stacks will reset at the end of the ability's duration. You naturally get healing fastest in fights with lots of weak enemies hitting you a lot. In fights where that can't happen, try kiting out one enemy using traps, then let him hit you to build up unbending, and just keep extending it with wall of draining, then once you have decent number of stacks run into combat. Nearly every fight has at least one weak enemy you could kite to do this, but if not, just blood sacrifice to near death, drink a potion of final stand, and throw a wall of draining. Of course you need to be L19+ for that so...

When soloing potd upscaled it is usually best to avoid difficult combat until you are high level. You may need to complete some more quests, easy bounties, or just sail around...I'm usually L19 or l20 by the time I've done ashen maw, even with eothas trial constraints, and you can do this avoiding most combat. Check ultimate runs for pathing, they are usually pretty similar, though you have more freedom with eothas off. There are lots of quests you can complete without combat, like motare o kozi, poko kahara (except the very end), symbols of death, Crookspur, etc. Stealth is your friend. When you do get wall of draining at L19 I think you'll find everything really falling into place.

Also solo runs are easier if you avoid rests and stack buffs. There are other threads with guides on no rest runs, the most important things to pick up are the dawnstar's blessing in Port maje which gives you +50% healing, and nature's resolve buff on tikiwara Island (+2 res, +10 accuracy). Here is a good guide on no rest runs. You can console in buffs if you missed them. In general you do this with "applystatuseffect player[press tab] [nameofeffect]". You can find the names (for example dawnstar blessing) with "findgamedata dawnstar" or "findgamedata boon". You may get a big list as a result but they have the statuseffectgamedata type. 

You should easily have room for mule kick. You don't need to memorize spells at all but I'd suggest memorizing wall of draining since it isn't in ninagauth/arkemyr/llengrath/ironclasped. Maybe if you tell me what fighter and wizard abilities you've taken I can give my opinion which ones you don't really need. It's really useful for easy aoe interrupts, even if you mostly prefer casting spells. 

--

Also yes while you are lower level SC blood mage is going to be better mostly because you get wall of draining a lot faster. But in potd solo runs you typically want to level up a lot before doing hard combat anyway, and it isn't hard to reach l19 just questing and sailing around, so by the time you're doing difficult content (megabosses, DLC etc.) you should be max level either way.

Edited March 20, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[trias10]

I have built my character according to the OP of this thread on page 1. Have been using that as an exact blueprint and picking the spells and abilities listed there, although I did deviate slightly to pick up the core necessary Tactician skills too: disciplined strikes, unbending, and refreshing defence.

However, if you have a better list of abilities and spells I should take instead, please let me know and I will retrain my character.

Grimoire switching is something I am playing around with during combat, although it is a drag because there is a cooldown of a single round/turn in turn based which sucks, and can lose you a lot of momentum by doing so, so I try to avoid grimoire switching.

When Brilliant Tactician does proc though, the results are pretty epic, because it refreshes ALL of your spells each round in turn based, so you can just keep casting your highest level spells over and over again, and don't need to risk killing yourself with blood sacrifice. But getting it to proc is difficult, basically only overlapping Chill Fog works for me.

I now have Wall of Draining and I have to say, it's kind of a let down. For you see, it only boosts your own beneficial effects IF the enemies it is draining have their own beneficial effects. If they don't have beneficial effects active, then the wall does nothing. I assumed it always increased your own beneficial effects just by having enemies stand in the wall, but no, it's only if they have buffs of their own, which is somewhat situational, although once you get to the higher level encounters it's less of an issue.

Jury is still out on whether Tactician/BM beats SC, but I will say that having now been in some difficult fights, when you get Brilliant to proc, you really feel powerful as hell, it's pretty great. Just wish it was easier to proc.

[Shai Hulud]

17 hours ago, trias10 said:

I have built my character according to the OP of this thread on page 1. Have been using that as an exact blueprint and picking the spells and abilities listed there, although I did deviate slightly to pick up the core necessary Tactician skills too: disciplined strikes, unbending, and refreshing defence.

That's a good guideline for what that build is trying to do (cast lots of spells), but you should deviate significantly for a battlemage (see below)

17 hours ago, trias10 said:

However, if you have a better list of abilities and spells I should take instead, please let me know and I will retrain my character.

Grimoire switching is something I am playing around with during combat, although it is a drag because there is a cooldown of a single round/turn in turn based which sucks, and can lose you a lot of momentum by doing so, so I try to avoid grimoire switching.

Yeah this is the most annoying aspect of turn-based, but you can use standard actions and then switch grimoires. Memorize a few critical spells (chill fog, slicken, wall of draining), and the rest can be planned. To avoid wasting a round switch grimoires after using standard actions like mule kick or a standard weapon attack. Can also use ABD to heal / get resources / switch grimoires. You can cast wall of draining while invisible but you can't blood sacrifice without losing it so keep that in mind.

17 hours ago, trias10 said:

When Brilliant Tactician does proc though, the results are pretty epic, because it refreshes ALL of your spells each round in turn based, so you can just keep casting your highest level spells over and over again, and don't need to risk killing yourself with blood sacrifice. But getting it to proc is difficult, basically only overlapping Chill Fog works for me.

I now have Wall of Draining and I have to say, it's kind of a let down. For you see, it only boosts your own beneficial effects IF the enemies it is draining have their own beneficial effects. If they don't have beneficial effects active, then the wall does nothing. I assumed it always increased your own beneficial effects just by having enemies stand in the wall, but no, it's only if they have buffs of their own, which is somewhat situational, although once you get to the higher level encounters it's less of an issue.

Jury is still out on whether Tactician/BM beats SC, but I will say that having now been in some difficult fights, when you get Brilliant to proc, you really feel powerful as hell, it's pretty great. Just wish it was easier to proc.

Not true regarding wall of draining. You get more benefit if enemies have stuff to drain but you do get some even if they don't. Just line up the walls so they hit as many enemies as possible. Have to say if wall of draining is a let down you're not using it right

Try wearing the cap of the laughingstock. It gives -10 deflection and immunity to resolve to anyone in the aura, which is 2.5m and modified by intelligence, so with decent INT it's pretty large, the same size as an INT modified fireball (probably around 5m radius). The "village fool" effect is both a buff (immunity to resolve afflictions) and debuff (-10 deflection), but it is irresistable and shows up as a buff on enemies, meaning you can drain it, and since it has no duration you can always drain it. In a party the village fool effect would also apply to nearby party members, gimping their deflection, but solo there is no downside as the aura only applies to you if you have some kind of clone wearing the cap (mirror image, phantoms), which you may want in fights where you need resolve immunity, so in those just keep up mirrored image or a phantom.  It's one of the deck of many things items. 

So these are roughly what I'd pick per level as a high level respec. (While leveling up I'd take Vigorous Defense at 10 but once you get Llengrath's Safeguard and Wall of Draining, it isn't needed anymore since you can proc the safeguard and extend with wall of draining and the effects don't stack).

L1: Disciplined Barrage / Chill Fog
L2: Knock Down
L3: Slicken
L4: Fighter Stances / Two-Handed Style
L5: Confident Aim
L6: Weapon and Shield Style
L7: Disciplined Strikes / Bear's Fortitude
L8: Mule Kick
L9: Rapid Recovery
L10: Charge / Secrets of Rime
L11: Weapon Specialization
L12: Bull's Will or Elemental +1PEN of choice
L13: Unbending / Uncanny Luck
L14: Conqueror Stance
L15: Armored Grace
L16: Improved Critical / Tough
L17: Farcasting or Elemental +1PEN of choice
L18: Pull of Eora or Elemental +1PEN of choice
L19: Unbending Shield / Wall of Draining
L20: Weapon Mastery

Weapons: Club, Pike, Rapier, Quarterstaff, Morningstar, Flail or whatever weapon of choice. Mostly you use Kapana Taga (or Squid's Grasp) for flanking immunity until buffs are up, then Citzal's Spirit Lance. For enemies immune or resistant to piercing, Concelhaut's Parasitic Quarterstaff is actually rather good, or any of a number of sabres (or fists even, though you'd need to take Monastic Unarmed Training)

Only spells I'd consider must takes are Chill Fog, Slicken, and Wall of Draining. These are the most important spells for you to have immediate access to with this build (for the brilliant procs, interrupts, and extension), for others you can plan grimoire switches. I also like Pull of Eora for how it groups enemies for hitting them with the lance or wall of draining, but it isn't a must-take. 

Important spells from Llengrath's Martial Masteries: Infuse, Spirit Shield, Deleterious Alacrity of Motion, Llengrath's Displaced Image, Ironskin, Arcane Reflection, Llengrath's Safeguard, Citzal's Spirit Lance

Arkemyr's Grimoire: Arcane Veil, Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure, Essential Phantom, Call to Slumber

Ninagauth's Teachings: Ninagauth's Shadowflame, Death Ring, Ninagauth's Freezing Pillar

Ironclasped Grimoire: Concelhaut's Crushing Doom, Gaze of the Adragan, Concelhaut's Draining Touch (for giving to phantoms), Concelhaut's Draining Missiles

Might as well list some items, though some depend on the situation

Head: Cap of the Laughingstock most fights, sometimes Rekvu's Fractured Casque
Neck: Charm of Bones, Strand of Favor, Precognition
Body: Devil of Caroc BP with Devil's Due
Rings: Entonia Signet Ring + Ring of Prosperity's Fortune (ring of minor protection if poor)
Feet: Footprints of Ahu Taka
Cape: - Giftbearer's Cloth mostly, alternatively Cape of the Falling Star
Hands: Firethrower's Gloves or Gauntlets of Accuracy mainly, Left Hand of the Obscured and Gatecrashers also good for melee
Waist: Upright Captain's Belt for immunity to Pull of Eora (alternatively take Hold the Line and wear Undying Burden)
Pet: Pes or Abraham early, Retina later for +1 flanking and +5 accuracy, or Ooblit for +1 round beneficial effects

Weapons:Kapana Taga + Lethandria's Devotion, Kapana Taga + Outworn Buckler (use copy function on weapon), you get Kapana Taga from boarding or sinking The Heaving Harlot, a ship that patrols near The Black Isles. Squid's Grasp is a decent substitute, possibly better due to attempted parley, though I'm not really sure how the bonus action speed translates in turn based vs RTWP.