I wonder Wizard/Priest(bloodmage/skaen's) POTD solo play

[okibary]

I want play wizard/priest (bloodmage/skaen's) in solo potd.

Is there an article about bloodmage/skaen

(Initial stats, item, skills, abolities?)

I like watch and flow~! Please 

Any forum posts about this?

[Kaylon]

This combo becomes powerful only at high level and requires heavy buffing to be effective (which becomes boring pretty fast). I wouldn't recommend it for normal play unless you want to use exploits (at which point it's better to pick a class that you really enjoy and use Strand of Favor).

[boareder]

I think you can check out Decadency’s Ultimate Run on YouTube. That was the exact combo used. There are quite a few ultimate runs with that combo also. Or u can trawl through the Ultimate Thread.

[Raven Darkholme]

Decadency's run would be the most comprehensive source of knowledge.

A very brief tldr would be:

Get to level 13 for phantom via non-combat quests.

Now you are able to equip your phantom with Mantle of the seven bolts or a similar cloak with on death explode effect.

If you have Berath's challenge active (can be activated via console but needs iroll20s)

you can start a fight with a trap, while being stealthed.

You can also summon phantoms and remain stealthed.

Since they explode on death you can kill MUCH higher level enemies with it, takes quite a bit of patience tho.

Once you get to level 16 and Salvation of time, there is no need for phantoms anymore because you can just SoT brilliant from cloak and bdd for immortality.

 

A different easier  more cheesy way would be to use Strand of favour, but as Kaylon said it would almost be better to play a less op more fun class, because Skaen/wizard is already op without strand.

[Haplok]

1 hour ago, Raven Darkholme said:

A different easier  more cheesy way would be to use Strand of favour, but as Kaylon said it would almost be better to play a less op more fun class, because Skaen/wizard is already op without strand.

I do admire your persistence and consequence in suggesting various players exploiting game bugs as means to win the game.

[Raven Darkholme]

23 minutes ago, Haplok said:

I do admire your persistence and consequence in suggesting various players exploiting game bugs as means to win the game.

Dude what's wrong with you?

I went out of my way to write a somewhat detailed way of how to play without strand, I'm really tired of having this same conversation over and over with you....

[Haplok]

9 minutes ago, Raven Darkholme said:

Dude what's wrong with you?

I went out of my way to write a somewhat detailed way of how to play without strand, I'm really tired of having this same conversation over and over with you....

Yet somehow you never fail to mention Strand of Favor exploit in any conversation you take part in...

[Raven Darkholme]

19 minutes ago, Haplok said:

Yet somehow you never fail to mention Strand of Favor exploit in any conversation you take part in...

Maybe I'm trying to make a brief, yet detailed post about solo potd play...

Where is your contribution to the topic at hand?

[boareder]

2 hours ago, Raven Darkholme said:

Decadency's run would be the most comprehensive source of knowledge.

A very brief tldr would be:

Get to level 13 for phantom via non-combat quests.

Now you are able to equip your phantom with Mantle of the seven bolts or a similar cloak with on death explode effect.

If you have Berath's challenge active (can be activated via console but needs iroll20s)

you can start a fight with a trap, while being stealthed.

You can also summon phantoms and remain stealthed.

Since they explode on death you can kill MUCH higher level enemies with it, takes quite a bit of patience tho.

Once you get to level 16 and Salvation of time, there is no need for phantoms anymore because you can just SoT brilliant from cloak and bdd for immortality.

 

A different easier  more cheesy way would be to use Strand of favour, but as Kaylon said it would almost be better to play a less op more fun class, because Skaen/wizard is already op without strand.

TIL about Mantle of Seven Stars and clones! Gonna try exploding clones with a Monk now..

[Raven Darkholme]

15 minutes ago, boareder said:

TIL about Mantle of Seven Stars and clones! Gonna try exploding clones with a Monk now..

Oh yeah it works with monk too, but at level 17 you kinda rather want them to be distractions hehe.

(would have been useful for leveling tho)

[Elric Galad]

25 minutes ago, Raven Darkholme said:

Maybe I'm trying to make a brief, yet detailed post about solo potd play...

Where is your contribution to the topic at hand?

I think it's hard not to mention it, especially for Solo Play.

Strand of favor is the new BDD + SoT + Brilliant.

It's really the mother of all cheese, nowadays.

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, boareder said:

TIL about Mantle of Seven Stars and clones! Gonna try exploding clones with a Monk now..

If you pick a Wizard (with the Phantom) you can also equip it with Effort (Great Sword) which has an enchantment that does an AoE weapon attack on Knockout. Since the weapon also has a 15% raw DoT this is quite nice. Besides the Mantle of the Seven Bolts there's also armor (Effigy's Husk for example) that causes dmg on knockout. And a few other items iirc. You can build a nice "bomb voyage" Phantom that way.

Monk summons have the drawback (in this case) that they don't get your weapons - so no Effort. But but there are two of them so I guess that evens out.  

Edited May 31, 2021 by Boeroer

[Not So Clever Hound]

2 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

I think it's hard not to mention it, especially for Solo Play.

Strand of favor is the new BDD + SoT + Brilliant.

It's really the mother of all cheese, nowadays.

This topic is reoccurring enough that we as a community could try to solve nicely and diplomatically at some point, maybe provide some kind of commonly agreed recos on how to use or not SoF for the best gaming experience? I think there is more common ground than we'd think for a baseline.

We have three camps:

Camp in favor of repeatedly equipping/unequipping SoF to prolong effects:

• Pros: Deadfire only gives the tools to beat everything in the game to certain classes. SoF levels the playing field as an Anti-Nerf Bat, enabling more classes to be PotD/Upscaled/Solo/The Ultimate viable, and that is for the better. No big deal, it's a single player game, you can use whatever you want that is in the game.
• Cons: with SoF, everything boils down to hoarding prolongable effects and extending them by equipping/unequipping SoF. Certain class/ability choices become meaningless. Also, why use any other class than SC Assassin then: gamebreaking invulnerability with one ability.

Camp in favor of not using SoF:

• Pros: Keep class specifics and certain unique, rich combinations relatively superior (or vastly over-powered in certain cases). SoF trick is too much of an abuse vs other commonly accepted cheesy combos.
• Cons: without SoF, only a handful of classes arbitrarily have some "game-breaking" tools to deal with all high-level content in the highest difficulty levels. If you focus on full completion and/or Solo stuff, you have to have certain classes to be able to win. Even the best player with the most balanced party archetype may lose to Megabosses if they don't have certain "trick" classes. That's frustrating.

Everybody else:

• Pros: I don't know about it, but i sounds super strong and game-breaking.
• Cons: I don't know about it, but i sounds super strong and game-breaking.

Edited May 31, 2021 by Not So Clever Hound

[Raven Darkholme]

And here I thought we already discussed this to death.

[Elric Galad]

3 hours ago, Not So Clever Hound said:

This topic is reoccurring enough that we as a community could try to solve nicely and diplomatically at some point, maybe provide some kind of commonly agreed recos on how to use or not SoF for the best gaming experience? I think there is more common ground than we'd think for a baseline.

We have three camps:

Camp in favor of repeatedly equipping/unequipping SoF to prolong effects:

• Pros: Deadfire only gives the tools to beat everything in the game to certain classes. SoF levels the playing field as an Anti-Nerf Bat, enabling more classes to be PotD/Upscaled/Solo/The Ultimate viable, and that is for the better. No big deal, it's a single player game, you can use whatever you want that is in the game.
• Cons: with SoF, everything boils down to hoarding prolongable effects and extending them by equipping/unequipping SoF. Certain class/ability choices become meaningless. Also, why use any other class than SC Assassin then: gamebreaking invulnerability with one ability.

Camp in favor of not using SoF:

• Pros: Keep class specifics and certain unique, rich combinations relatively superior (or vastly over-powered in certain cases). SoF trick is too much of an abuse vs other commonly accepted cheesy combos.
• Cons: without SoF, only a handful of classes arbitrarily have some "game-breaking" tools to deal with all high-level content in the highest difficulty levels. If you focus on full completion and/or Solo stuff, you have to have certain classes to be able to win. Even the best player with the most balanced party archetype may lose to Megabosses if they don't have certain "trick" classes. That's frustrating.

Everybody else:

• Pros: I don't know about it, but i sounds super strong and game-breaking.
• Cons: I don't know about it, but i sounds super strong and game-breaking.

In this case, I'm the worst category of extremist. I don't use it myself and in addition I've disabled it for the upcoming version of my mod (SoF & Oooblit & Gambeson won't apply anymore their extension effect to already active buff).

More seriously, I don't play Solo and my mod isn't balanced for it, granted that solo play is a lot about using cheese and the mod is basically hunting down the cheese. I'm not even sure one can complete Solo without cheesing (SoT...) or without using the most broken subclasses (Bloodmage and Tactician, I'm looking at you). I would presume Solo is much harder with the nerf component of my mod (even with Potion of Enlightment https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/501 which was designed to allow long fight for non-infinite ressources classes).

I don't like cheese, because they are not as epic as regular synergies. But Solo play is special in that one has basically to survive in order to get the levels/equipement that allows to break the game just enough to move to the next step of the run. It sounds like a survival where meta is paramount (especially of one want to go with some of the God Challenge). Not my cup of tea but I see why cheesing could be "legit" in this context.
That's why it's normal to tell other about it (and @Raven Darkholmedescribed it as a cheese in the thread).

My only grip about SoF is maybe when @Raven Darkholme tells me that summons are weak. Huh ? Compared to what ? Brilliant + SoT + BDD + Blade Cascade ? SoF abuse ? Then for sure, but I don't consider these legit (and I've modded out all of these).
So when evaluating the power of a specific build, SoF should probably not be used as a metric.

Edited May 31, 2021 by Elric Galad

[Raven Darkholme]

14 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

My only grip about SoF is maybe when @Raven Darkholme tells me that summons are weak. Huh ? Compared to what ? Brilliant + SoT + BDD + Blade Cascade ? SoF abuse ? Then for sure, but I don't consider these legit (and I've modded out all of these).
So when evaluating the power of a specific build, SoF should probably not be used as a metric.

You don't need SoF to make a build better than a summoner.

What's weak about summons is their damage output, there is not enough ways to push it.

Blade Cascade is an extreme example, but it does not need SoF at all, SoT or WoD are more than plenty to melt Dorudugan in 10 seconds.

Meanwhile if you tried to kill it with summons exclusively it would most likely take you several hours.

Now ik Doru is an extreme example too, but this holds true for any "tanky" enemy, the others just won't take quite as long.

Also you're taking this a little bit out of context, I was comparing Poe summons to Baldur's Gate summons because the topic was about that very comparison.

[Not So Clever Hound]

5 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

In this case, I'm the worst category of extremist.

Well you sound like a very reasonable extremist .

My personal POV that I will try to synthesize in a different way here is that I tend to avoid SoF for my own Solo playstyle for the following reason. The key advantage of SoF cheese in making more classes and builds relevant for high-level Solo is undeniable. But then the focus tends to become the maximization of SoF itself, not really the class. So for me personally, it kind-of defeats its own purpose. It sounds fun to suddenly be able to solo a Mage Slayer or whatever with SoF, but then you're not really soloing a Mage Slayer, you're soloing a SoF-extending build first and foremost - the class becomes almost secondary.

[boareder]

8 hours ago, Not So Clever Hound said:

This topic is reoccurring enough that we as a community could try to solve nicely and diplomatically at some point, maybe provide some kind of commonly agreed recos on how to use or not SoF for the best gaming experience? I think there is more common ground than we'd think for a baseline.

We have three camps:

Camp in favor of repeatedly equipping/unequipping SoF to prolong effects:

• Pros: Deadfire only gives the tools to beat everything in the game to certain classes. SoF levels the playing field as an Anti-Nerf Bat, enabling more classes to be PotD/Upscaled/Solo/The Ultimate viable, and that is for the better. No big deal, it's a single player game, you can use whatever you want that is in the game.
• Cons: with SoF, everything boils down to hoarding prolongable effects and extending them by equipping/unequipping SoF. Certain class/ability choices become meaningless. Also, why use any other class than SC Assassin then: gamebreaking invulnerability with one ability.

Camp in favor of not using SoF:

• Pros: Keep class specifics and certain unique, rich combinations relatively superior (or vastly over-powered in certain cases). SoF trick is too much of an abuse vs other commonly accepted cheesy combos.
• Cons: without SoF, only a handful of classes arbitrarily have some "game-breaking" tools to deal with all high-level content in the highest difficulty levels. If you focus on full completion and/or Solo stuff, you have to have certain classes to be able to win. Even the best player with the most balanced party archetype may lose to Megabosses if they don't have certain "trick" classes. That's frustrating.

Everybody else:

• Pros: I don't know about it, but i sounds super strong and game-breaking.
• Cons: I don't know about it, but i sounds super strong and game-breaking.

You know. We should use this post as a TL:DR  I’m gonna try to document some of SoF cheese and we can use this as the opener.

 

tbh though, the Ultimate is so hard that you could die even with the Assassin cheese. There’s a lotta levels between 1-19. Getting ur ship sunk, running into too many storms, getting too many ship events, accidentally exiting the water shaper guild.  I’m thinking Vela is still vulnerable too. So you’re still subject to quite a bit of RNG here no? Unless u manage to find lots of scrolls of withdraw
 

[Elric Galad]

7 hours ago, Raven Darkholme said:

You don't need SoF to make a build better than a summoner.

What's weak about summons is their damage output, there is not enough ways to push it.

Blade Cascade is an extreme example, but it does not need SoF at all, SoT or WoD are more than plenty to melt Dorudugan in 10 seconds.

Meanwhile if you tried to kill it with summons exclusively it would most likely take you several hours.

Now ik Doru is an extreme example too, but this holds true for any "tanky" enemy, the others just won't take quite as long.

Also you're taking this a little bit out of context, I was comparing Poe summons to Baldur's Gate summons because the topic was about that very comparison.

Yep, but that's a bit the same point : you consider summons weak, not because you compare them to the cheesiest strat of the game, but because you compare them to the second cheesiest strat of the game.

Granted that these strats are totally ok for (solo) play, but not to evaluate the power of a given ability.

That said, we have different Impression about BG summon Vs PoE summon but that's another story.

[Raven Darkholme]

4 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

Yep, but that's a bit the same point : you consider summons weak, not because you compare them to the cheesiest strat of the game, but because you compare them to the second cheesiest strat of the game.

Granted that these strats are totally ok for (solo) play, but not to evaluate the power of a given ability.

That said, we have different Impression about BG summon Vs PoE summon but that's another story.

Well, as I said Blade Cascade is an extreme example, the difference between needing 10 seconds and several hours is quite big, don't you agree?

There is plenty of ways to kill a tanky target faster than summons could , solo.

Let's stay with Dorudugan and we have two pretty common examples how people used to solo him when he came out, one was sc monk stacking resonance with a multi hitting ranged weapon, takes like 20 minutes, still A LOT faster than summon only damage, tbf you're most likely gonna use monk clones as a distraction.

(as far as I remember I did mention in the other thread I think summons are quite useful as distractions)

Another option is a chanter multiclass using Essence Interrupter and kiting with many lives pass by, once again utilizing the summons as a distraction.

In my own first Doru kill back when he came out I used WoD (tactician/bloodmage) however I did not use blade cascade, just buffed up as much as I could with chromoprismatic and it took me about 30 minutes, still a lot faster than summons.

And ofc had I known about bleeding cut it would have been over in less than 10 minutes, even without blade cascade bleeding cut is super deadly.

[Kaylon]

4 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

Yep, but that's a bit the same point : you consider summons weak, not because you compare them to the cheesiest strat of the game, but because you compare them to the second cheesiest strat of the game.

All summons without scaling weapons are very weak, not weak. The high level ones are just damage sponges, while the lower level ones aren't even good as damage sponges.

Uncontrollable summons should be equivalent to charmed enemies, while the controllable ones (chanter's summons) equivalent to dominated enemies - that's common sense and balance. Whisper of Treason - lvl 1 spammable cipher spell is stronger than most summoning spells in the game - you can charm stronger enemies than any summon without number limit for nearly the same duration.

Edited June 1, 2021 by Kaylon

[Elric Galad]

2 minutes ago, Kaylon said:

All summons without scaling weapons are very weak, not weak. The high level ones are just damage sponges, while the lower level ones aren't even good as damage sponges.

Yeah that's their main problem indeed. Some of them have redeeming features (Wisp's AoE interrupt, Ogre Sweaping attack that they can use an infinite number of time and scale independantly from their weapons, Dragons' AoEs or Spiritual Ally infinite cast of healing ability) but their auto-attacks are super bad.

And most Chanter and Druid summons have this problem.

On the other hand Ancient Weapons are among the best ability of the game, Druid's Primordial are top tier damage sponge (one can even cast "free" insect Plague) and Wizard and Monk summons are pretty good.

I was just reacting to a previous statement that declared that all summons are weak.

2 minutes ago, Kaylon said:

Uncontrollable summons should be equivalent to charmed enemies, while the controllable ones (chanter's summons) equivalent to dominated enemies - that's common sense and balance. Whisper of Treason - lvl 1 spammable cipher spell is stronger than most summoning spells in the game - you can charm stronger enemies than any summon without number limit for nearly the same duration.

Difference is that Summons last longer and a great number of foes are immune to Charm. Also a charmed foe which hits a single friendly fire attack gets un-charmed.
But yeah, when everything goes well, you're right.

[Kaylon]

2 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

On the other hand Ancient Weapons are among the best ability of the game, Druid's Primordial are top tier damage sponge (one can even cast "free" insect Plague) and Wizard and Monk summons are pretty good.

I was talking about summons without scaling weapons - Animated Weapons, Dichotomous Soul and Wizard's phantoms are all good ones. Other than that they're just expensive damage sponges.

[Elric Galad]

15 minutes ago, Raven Darkholme said:

Well, as I said Blade Cascade is an extreme example, the difference between needing 10 seconds and several hours is quite big, don't you agree?

There is plenty of ways to kill a tanky target faster than summons could , solo.

Let's stay with Dorudugan and we have two pretty common examples how people used to solo him when he came out, one was sc monk stacking resonance with a multi hitting ranged weapon, takes like 20 minutes, still A LOT faster than summon only damage, tbf you're most likely gonna use monk clones as a distraction.

(as far as I remember I did mention in the other thread I think summons are quite useful as distractions)

Another option is a chanter multiclass using Essence Interrupter and kiting with many lives pass by, once again utilizing the summons as a distraction.

In my own first Doru kill back when he came out I used WoD (tactician/bloodmage) however I did not use blade cascade, just buffed up as much as I could with chromoprismatic and it took me about 30 minutes, still a lot faster than summons.

And ofc had I known about bleeding cut it would have been over in less than 10 minutes, even without blade cascade bleeding cut is super deadly.

Yep, but for other fights, including Megabosses, summon can contribute significantly.

I remember sending my Nalzpaca tanking one of Hauni first split while the rest of my party took out the other half.

My Nalzpaca stayed in a corner and summoned the Twins.

When the party had finished the first pack of ooze, I realied that the repeated cast of the twins took half of the HP of the Gigantic Ooze by themselves. I wouldn't say that's super good but that was fairly significant, especially for an ability used mainly for tanking.

Dorudugan is a special case because it's only weak vs Crush and Shock damages and I think all summons with these types of damages don't have scaling weapons. I think a Wizard's clone with Essence Interrupter can still add up a significant percentage to damages done.

[Elric Galad]

3 minutes ago, Kaylon said:

I was talking about summons without scaling weapons - Animated Weapons, Dichotomous Soul and Wizard's phantoms are all good ones. Other than that they're just expensive damage sponges.

Yeah, I basically agree with this.