Die and Res Barbarian review

[crdvis16]

I wanted to report back after playing a die and res Barbarian.  The idea was to stack a bunch of "on death" items in order to set a bomb off when you die.  The items I used (there may be others I missed?) are:

Vengeful Defeat (lv8 ability) - Full attack AoE on death

Effort 2Her- Full attack AoE on death enchantment

Effigy's Husk armor- Raw damage AoE on death enchantment

Least Unstable Coil belt- Shock/Stun AoE on death

Cape of the Falling Star - Burn/Crush AoE on death

Mantle of the Seven Bolts - Shock AoE on death

Obviously, Cape of the Falling Star and Mantle of the Seven Bolts are mutually exclusive.  I also found The Twin Eels to be a nice addition with its auto-res enchantment.  You can charge in with Twin Eels, die, res with low health from Twin Eels enchantment, and then switch to Effort for the 2nd death.

Another useful item would have been Survivor's Tusk.  One of the upgrades is to res and clear all injuries.  However, I was using Vatnir (modded) for this build so couldn't wear a helm.  But if I was able to use it, I would have switched to Survivor's Tusk anytime I had 2 injuries so that in the next battle I could die, res, and clear the injuries back to 0.  Having injuries in general doesn't bother this build that much- injuries typically just make you die faster and that's kind of the goal.  But not having to rest quite as often would be a nice QoL improvement for this build.  There is the ring of reset that clears injuries as well but I didn't want to bother with its limited charges. 

In battle, my general strategy was to Panther's Leap into a group of enemies then follow up with Dazing Shout, Spirit Tornado, and Heart of Fury.  This build allows you to play really recklessly because you don't care if you die and oftentimes want to die.  It's also nice to drop a dexterity debuff on top of the mobs around the barbarian since many of the death effects target reflex.

In reality, I found that some of the items involved in this build were rather underwhelming.  From my combat log:

-Vengeful Defeat (full attack on all in range on death):
This ability seemed like the best part of this build.  It procs carnage and benefits from all the normal things a weapon attack normally would from what I saw (2 handed style, one stands alone, weapon quality %bonus, etc etc etc the list can get long).  What's more, the penetration gets a nice ability level bonus.  My combat log shows penetration at 7 base for Effort, +weapon quality bonus, and an extra 3.5 for ability level.

-Valiant Demise (Effort enchantment):
Also decent but not as good as Vengeful Defeat.  It didn't seem to proc carnage for some reason though I wonder if I'm misreading the combat log.  It would often list a bunch of hit/crit/miss in a drop down but when you expand the list it would actually show far fewer hit resolutions.  Not sure which display is actually accurate.  In any case, its penetration is also lower than Vengeful Defeat- you only get the normal weapon penetration and bonus penetration from weapon quality but it does benefit from all the normal weapon attack damage modifiers like Vengeful Defeat.

-Effigy's Husk:
The best of the non-weapon attack on death effects.  This armor does a raw damage AoE on death which means penetration doesn't matter.  It also gets some odd +5 accuracy bonus but it doesn't list the source of it and it targets reflex.  The damage only seemed to benefit from might and the +25% damage when bloodied ability.  The base damage is ~50 which is nice.

-Mantle of the Seven Bolts:
AoE shock damage with a penetration of 9.  9 is Ok- often underpens but maybe at a -25% or -50% penalty rather than -75%.  It targets reflex and its accuracy was 84 at level 20 (20 from barbarian, 7 from perception, and 57 from level) which isn't great when many enemies are ~100 reflex..  Base damage is just ~30.  In reality you end up grazing or under penetrating and doing reduced damage, especially since there are many positive damage modifiers beyond might/bloodied.

-Cape of the Falling Star:
It just keeps getting worse- same accuracy as Mantle but now just 7 penetration (targeting crush or fire so maybe that helps a little) which more often than not means a -75% damage modifier.  Base damage is 40 but it gets so reduced by miss/graze/underpen that it becomes barely noticeable.

-Unstable Coil:
You would think this might be better considering it's a fairly late game item but nope, it's probably the worst of the bunch in terms of damage.  Same terrible 7 penetration and low accuracy targeting reflex but now just ~30 base damage.  It does stun, though, which is nice.

The net effect is that you can really blow up packs of weaker enemies but you often don't make a great dent in tougher enemies.  It's especially weak in encounters with very few enemies where the multi hit/AoE nature of the death effects are sort of wasted and unfortunately that can often include boss fights.  Boss fights also tend to drag on which hurts this build where you can really only die so many times.  But it's FUN!

I think it would be nice if the penetration on falling star and coil were maybe bumped up to at least match seven bolts at 9 to make them more useful.

I also considered running this type of build with a Paladin using Sacred Sacrifice.  Sacred Sacrifice resses you as long as it's active when you die.  However, a Paladin would be missing Vengeful Defeat which does a lot of work for the Barbarian.  Also, a Paladin is mostly just bringing a self res to the table which can be accomplished by party members ressing you anyway.  I think a Paladin build would be useful if Sacred Sacrifice cleared injuries so that you could die way more than 3 times (might even make it viable in boss fights!).

And then there's a Monk with Dichotomous Soul or a Wizard with Phantoms.  In this case you don't worry about injuries because you're sending your minions to die.  For the Monk, though, your clones would just have Unstable Coil, Effigy's Husk, and one of the capes (they use fists instead of Effort I assume) and those 3 items as they currently stand don't bring a ton of damage to the table.  On the plus side, Dichotomous clones are spammable in long fights though I've often found that my clones tend to live long enough to expire due to their summon duration rather than die and presumably wouldn't proc the on death effects in that case.  A Wizard's phantoms would at least copy Effort for Valiant Demise procs but it's maybe harder to spam phantoms with the Wizard's resource limits.

I seem to remember from past playthroughs that there is a cape (I think) that can create a bunch of copies of you, like maybe 4 or 5?  And I believe they are pretty fragile so likely to die quickly?  I didn't find it this playthrough for whatever reason but I really wanted to try it.  I can't remember the name, though, so can't even search for where to get it.  That could work really well if they all proc the item death effects.  If anyone remembers that cape please let me know so I can test it out!

I also haven't tried comboing this with a scroll of Avenging Storm.  I would think the weapon attacks from Vengeful Defeat and Valiant Demise would proc lightning bolts?  Or I wonder if there are other scrolls/items that might combo well with these effects (either the weapon attacks on everyone in range or the shock/fire/crush/raw AoE spell damage effects).

[thelee]

what a neat build, i never though to try make those on-death effects worthwhile.

 

16 minutes ago, crdvis16 said:

I seem to remember from past playthroughs that there is a cape (I think) that can create a bunch of copies of you, like maybe 4 or 5?  And I believe they are pretty fragile so likely to die quickly?  I didn't find it this playthrough for whatever reason but I really wanted to try it.  I can't remember the name

I believe it's Shroud of the Phantasm, which is great for other reasons as well.

[crdvis16]

Thanks!  I will go back to get that Shroud and test it out.  No idea how I missed it in Bekarna's observatory. 

[Constentin Lévine]

Like noticed in comment from this topic, not all the on-death-AoE proc , I dont know why. 

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/126180-class-build-beyond-the-veil/

 

This is probably why carnage dont happen in your test, maybe. That would mean with the other cape, Valiant Demise could work better, maybe again!

[crdvis16]

I didn't notice any of my items not performing their on death attacks during my (limited) testing.  At least a few times I know they all occured.  The only thing I was really confused about was the carnage attacks and how the combat log "group" description might list something like 10 hit/5 crit/5 miss and then when I opened up that group for more details it would only list, say, 12 attacks.  I might try to test this with fewer enemies to see if I can make it make sense (I was using the SSS slayer fight with the lions/panthers/staelgars).  I might have to respec a Barbarian without Vengeful defeat in order to really see if Valiant demise trips carnage or not.

[Not So Clever Hound]

Deciphering the combat log on a big fight and lots of rolls:

[Elric Galad]

A big issue is that most of the item related properties you're relying on are "Passive" . And Passive abilities from items don't scale with PL, character level or anything besides base stats. All the following items are on my TO DO lisit for next version of my Balance Polishing Mod :

-Effigy's Husk

-Mantle of the Seven Bolts

-Cape of the Falling Star

-Unstable Coil

Effort one scales with Weapon Quality enchant.

 

This leads to poor PEN, Accuracy and damages. [MECHANICS] The weird aspects of scaling - Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning!) - Obsidian Forum Community

 

 

Oh I was suppose to be on a "modding break", but I'm happy someone eventually ran into the problem I was trying to address   

[Elric Galad]

14 hours ago, Not So Clever Hound said:

Deciphering the combat log on a big fight and lots of rolls:

This may look like an old forgotten scripture to you.

But to me, it seems that the scaling is weirdly applied #Obsession.

Edited January 20, 2022 by Elric Galad

[Not So Clever Hound]

36 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

But to me, it seems that the scaling is weirdly applied #Obsession.

It seems your obsession with scaling is really... escalating.

OK je sors.  

[crdvis16]

Sweet!  I'm glad those items are on your radar for getting some scaling.  It's always sad to have an item with an interesting mechanic that ends up being underwhelming. 

[Elric Galad]

19 minutes ago, crdvis16 said:

Sweet!  I'm glad those items are on your radar for getting some scaling.  It's always sad to have an item with an interesting mechanic that ends up being underwhelming. 

That's the idea.

On 1/13/2022 at 11:11 PM, Elric Galad said:

I know I'm a bit obsessive about these weird scaling issues. But I've seen too many Abilities and items wasted in CRPG because they become obsolete due to absence of scaling.

PoE 2 has a very good scaling system. It was simply not systematically applied, which is just a little bit sad !

[crdvis16]

Shroud of the Phantasm does indeed work.  The 4 living illusions die very quickly from having very little health and will proc the raw damage from Effigy's Husk, the shock damage from Least Unstable Coil, and the attacks from Effort's Valiant Demise (obviously not Vengeful Defeat or Carnage procs).  Oddly, though, the attacks from Valiant Demise have just the base 7 penetration- no bonus penetration from the weapon quality.  No idea why the copies get Effort's attack on death perk but not the bonus penetration.  So the net effect right now is that the damage is pretty paltry other than Effigy's Husk's raw damage.  If these items do get their scaling fixed it could be pretty potent, though.

[Elric Galad]

I have started to work on a solution.

gamedata_bonus_to_non_scaling_passive.zip

These are supposed to be the files for Girdles, Cloaks and Gloves. And the main file with the generic scaling rules : as PL for items properties didn't work, I implemented a character level scaling close from a PL scaling for a level 1 ability :

+1 accuracy, +0.25 PEN and +5% additive damages every 2 character level.

This is implemented as a hidden property of the concerned object.

 

It mostly works. But for completely unknown reason, the scaling also applies to Blunderbusses (and mortars). Why ? Does it apply to something else. I have no clue ? 

Somehow "blunderbuss" validate the Keyword check... without having the same Keyword ID, while all otehr weapons work fine. I am quite desperate, so if any fellow modder could have a look, it would be greatly appreciated.

(or if you could at least confirm the problem on your own game, it would help too...)

Edit : Nevermind, I'm pretty sure it's because new Keywords shall be declared to work properly.

Edited January 23, 2022 by Elric Galad