Defeating Hauni O Whe AND Dorudugan in BPM (solo POTD upscaled etc.) ?

[Shai Hulud]

EDIT: Initial focus of this thread was HOW with blood mage, but I think this is pretty impossible so I've moved to trying a lot of different builds, succeeded with troubadour / psion and couple others, focusing on Dorudugan ATM. Troubadour / psion has trouble damaging him fast enough, as do most builds. Did kill him with a devoted / troubadour using Essence Interrupter with Energized up constantly but had to turn off Abydon's Challenge because the bow breaks very quickly. Checked after fight ended and I did over 25000 damage so he healed for about 18k over that period (like an hour?). Have tried some tanky builds that Doru can't kill like a barbarian / devoted just using unarmed attacks and no armor, but could only get him down to hurt even with energized + devoted pen buffs, his healing seems to pick up and his health stabilizes around there. One helfire barrage can heal him for like 700 health. IDK how to outdamage his healing.

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L20 blood mage, have all the trials on but wael and iron. 

I'm having a lot of trouble figuring this one out. The boss was easy enough when I had strand of favor extending energize and citzal's spirit lance interrupting AOE on crit.

But I'm trying to defeat it "legitimately" and after nearly an hour of grinding down the mountain form (mostly using phantoms with animancer's energy blade and Finality's Claim to reflect damage) while managing to protect Vela and not break my equipment, then getting the gigantic oozes to about 1/3 health each, I saw that merge symbol and kinda panicked...don't think I had any AOE interrupts available and it's just me and an essential or substantial phantom who I can't tell to target just one of them. Tried thrust of tattered veils and interrupted one of them but apparently you have to interrupt both of them. 

The gigantic ooze form is theoretically vulnerable to might and con afflictions, but I don't have any spells that stun besides I think Dimensional Shift. If I could control the phantom it would be easy enough to set that up, but it still has to hit vs. fortitude (good luck). There's Cloak of Death...not sure if that can hit both of them. 

Scrolls of Tornado were suggested to me. Could work, but their fortitude is really high. I don't think increasing my arcana improves my accuracy, just the damage and penetration right?

Minoletta's Concussive Missiles might work. Didn't have them in the grimoires I was using unfortunately. But interrupting is a temporary solution because they just keep trying to merge. Unless one of them is near death when that happens you probably can't stop it. 

Rolling Flame? Their reflex is pretty high. Not sure you can prone an ooze either. 

Call to Slumber, not sure if that works on these guys. Their will defense is also pretty high but I can debuff first with miasma of dull mindedness. Maybe that would work.

Or...potions of impediment plus meteor storm? Might work if I'm lucky, but with the blood sacrifice nerf it takes a while to get back a L9 spell so I can't spam it.

Death Ring *says* it can "potentially" destroy near death enemies whatever that means but I'm pretty sure doesn't work on HOW.

My only other idea is to use up my Ire of Death's Herald for about 60 seconds of Energized, combine with Citzal's Spirit Lance and try to hit both of them at once.

Watched most ultimate videos of the battle. Seems people mostly spam thrust of tattered veils with no recovery, using brilliant to spam high level super damaging spells with triple damage from conduit, monks with stunning surge and attacking way too fast, or have cipher with disintegration or soul annihilation (that last one would be me lol). Haven't seen anything that would really work with full recovery time.

Yeah so...could use some advice here. This seems like the hardest megaboss for a solo character that can't disintegrate things. I tried it again, this time with scrolls of tornado and potions of impediment but by the time I'd drunk the potion of impediment and recovered they'd already merged. Guess I have to drink those before they hit bloodied and then on bloodied just start spamming tornado?

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BTW SC blood mage sucks without cheese. At least compared to multiclassed blood mages. The L8 and L9 spells aren't that great compared to the ability to multiclass to e.g. cipher and gain +1 weapon pen and a ton of accuracy and defenses. I mean some of the L9 spells have penetration 11 or 12 *with* the spirit of X talents. Even if you eat crusted swordfish you're barely touching lot of bosses with AR 16+, unless you also have tenacious/energized (which you can't really get SC) and enough accuracy to crit (which you don't have as SC because your only accuracy buff is eldritch aim). My hierophant had functional accuracy about 30/40 points higher without cheese, plus way better defenses. The only REALLY good spell you can't get multiclassed is major grimoire imprint. Maybe it's just me but when I think L9 spells I think Time Stop, Wish, Chain Contingency releasing 3 Horrid Wiltings. Not Concelhaut's Itchy Skin

Edited February 8, 2023 by Shai Hulud
Because reasons

[thelee]

a) if not solo, the most "legitimate" way is to equip everyone other than your tank with crossbows or arbalests with modals on and interrupt merges. you would have to deliberately hold off on shooting at times to make sure you have it up and available when you need it, since the merge can happen very fast. if you are willing to go this far, there's an xbow that shoots in a line. you could reload, cast spells (so you don't fire) and then when you see a merge, run into position and fire to hit both oozes. there's a chance you'd miss, but it might serve as a backup if below strategies don't work.

b) the oozes are also vulnerable to dex afflictions - if you use petrify. it'll get resisted down to paralyze, which is still hard CC. but if you're doing this to stop a merge, you have to hit both mergers, if one is hard-CCed but the other is still able to merge, it'll still succeed.

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Death Ring *says* it can "potentially" destroy near death enemies whatever that means but I'm pretty sure doesn't work on HOW.

"potentially" was just game-dev future-proofing for adjustments of the percentage rate without needing to update text/translations. in reality, it's always been a 100% chance of success on a successful graze or better on a near-death enemy. however, this won't prevent HoW splits, and merges start happening at 50%.

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Haven't seen anything that would really work with full recovery time.

what about Concelhaut's Crushing Doom? interrupts multiple times, and does damage. you'd need to be able to rapidly recover it, don't know if that's possible w/ BPM's nerfs. just have a couple casts active on both oozes and the likelihood that they'll be able to merge is real low.

 

does BPM nerf wall of draining? energized + wall of draining on HoW to keep it up. you can use jester's cap to act as a buff that you can drain from HoW (unless BPM fixed this interaction). use stuff like chill fog or something else (not hazards) that will do potentially lots of interrupts while being easy to spam/restore. This solves the problem too that lower-level oozes that start merging immediately and you might be caught flat-footed if you're in the middle of recovery.

Edited January 31, 2023 by thelee

[Elric Galad]

BPM halves the buff time to +0.5s per hits (but doubles the de uff to - 2s per hit too) 

[Waski]

old school trick of Concelhaut's Crushing Doom?

[Shai Hulud]

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a) if not solo, the most "legitimate" way is to equip everyone other than your tank with crossbows or arbalests with modals on and interrupt merges. you would have to deliberately hold off on shooting at times to make sure you have it up and available when you need it, since the merge can happen very fast. if you are willing to go this far, there's an xbow that shoots in a line. you could reload, cast spells (so you don't fire) and then when you see a merge, run into position and fire to hit both oozes. there's a chance you'd miss, but it might serve as a backup if below strategies don't work.

Yeah has to be solo. I beat HOW with a party a while back but I don't really recall what I did. Probably focused on killing one and ignored the other. With five guys attacking a bloodied gigantic ooze they can probably kill it before the merge completes, I'd think. Or have several people devoted to CCing them, lots of choices when you don't have such restricted action economy.

Do you mean the Scourge of Bezzelo? I haven't used crossbows much but there's only two uniques I think, that one says it shoots 3 projectiles.

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b) the oozes are also vulnerable to dex afflictions - if you use petrify. it'll get resisted down to paralyze, which is still hard CC. but if you're doing this to stop a merge, you have to hit both mergers, if one is hard-CCed but the other is still able to merge, it'll still succeed.

I noticed this with wall of many colors, which did paralyze them sometimes but rarely both at once because their defenses are so high and the duration is rather short. Their fortitude saves are quite high and SC blood mage accuracy isn't good enough to hit reliably so would require a lot of luck to hard CC both of them that way.

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"potentially" was just game-dev future-proofing for adjustments of the percentage rate without needing to update text/translations. in reality, it's always been a 100% chance of success on a successful graze or better on a near-death enemy. however, this won't prevent HoW splits, and merges start happening at 50%.

So it doesn't work on HOW but it works on the gigantic oozes? Grazing at least one should almost always happen, and destroying one prevents the merge so maybe that is my best bet. Once one gets to near 50% I start spamming tornado (interrupts on graze), hopefully I get enough casts in to get one of them near death and then death ring. That could work, could also try guzzling potions of impediment and piercing strike then just attack one with a firebrand scroll or something, until near death, or if they're close enough together can use citzal's spirit lance. 

Does potion of impediment work on spells? If so could use scrolls of storm of holy fire or similar spells that throw lots of projectiles over a decent duration, there's so many projectiles that it should be interrupting a lot.

I was looking into some blood mage / X builds and blood mage / berserker looked really interesting because berserker gets tenacious (and hardy) from frenzy, plus a 30% hit to crit conversion, plus the interrupting blows feat and other barbarian goodies. The confused affliction isn't really a downside, as it is easy enough to negate, and the raw damage to self while frenzied is manageable but not being able to see your health is unfortunately a dealbreaker. You'd need a perfect script for trials runs and since blood sacrifice gives off random(ish) amounts of damage it would be extremely hard to keep track of your health in real time. Very unfortunate because that subclass adds a lot of melee viability that blood mage is lacking.

Could try with a hierophant again, think it would be pretty easy because of disintegration. I'm not married to SC blood mage that is just my jumping off point in trying to find a build that can possibly manage an ultimate style run in BPM. Which SC blood mage can do, for sure, if using major grimoire imprints, but I found the challenge level fell off pretty hard once I got that spell...

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what about Concelhaut's Crushing Doom? interrupts multiple times, and does damage. you'd need to be able to rapidly recover it, don't know if that's possible w/ BPM's nerfs. just have a couple casts active on both oozes and the likelihood that they'll be able to merge is real low.

I was using this spell a lot actually but it doesn't damage them quite fast enough. I drank a potion of enlightenment which restores one spell every 30 seconds, so my strategy around spell replenishment was using blood sacrifice to restore lower spells so I was only missing CCD, so that it would always be restored. That way I could cast it at least every 30 seconds (has a duration of around 20 seconds I think), usually faster unless unlucky with blood sacrifice (1/3 chance to restore L7+ in BPM from 1/2 chance at L7 in vanilla). I tried to keep it up as much as possible. It hits pretty reliably but the damage isn't great since they have AR 15 vs crushing unfortunately. Only weak to fire/frost/lightning with AR 9, and nearly all elemental spells target reflex which is pretty high. Can only reliably hit deflection and sorta reliably will.

Edit: I think I know what I did wrong with CCD. I was focusing on one ooze trying to kill it. So CCD lasts about 20 seconds and I get one back every 30 seconds, need to cast it twice every 20 seconds basically to keep interrupting both so CCD => CCD => blood sacrifice => blood sacrifice => blood sacrifice => heal cycle takes about 30 seconds. But since blood sacrifice is random I sometimes get nothing from blood sacrifice and just get back 1 cast from the potion of enlightenment. Blood sacrifice really should work by first checking if you're missing a low, mid, or high level spell, then if missing only one of those it does the appropriate damage and gives you back the resource, but instead it just randomly selects a tier, damages you, and gives you back a resource at that tier or lower, even if those tiers were full. This strategy of alternating CCD would likely work eventually. I'll try it tomorrow. I need to find something that works reliably though if I have any chance of doing an iron run. 

Can you explain what you meant about the jester's cap interaction? I was wearing this incidentally for the deflection debuff so the phantom hit more, but I didn't try wall of draining since it was nerfed pretty hard. Would have to line up a bunch of small oozes from a symbiote attack and drain them. I think you'd need 4, but symbiote I think just drops 3. Maybe if you lined them up with HOW you could still get good benefit extension. I'm not very practiced using WOD without pause, but yeah maybe that would work. Mostly I've ignored the spell because there aren't that many effects worth extending anymore. Besides maybe temporal cocoon but that falls into "illegitimate"...

@Waski

What is this old school trick of CCD?

Edited January 31, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[thelee]

3 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

Do you mean the Scourge of Bezzelo? I haven't used crossbows much but there's only two uniques I think, that one says it shoots 3 projectiles.

sorry it was an arbalest. mechanical marvel

 

3 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

So it doesn't work on HOW but it works on the gigantic oozes?

sorry, when i say "won't prevent HoW splits" i mean it won't prevent *any* split. but you're right, if you're fast, you can dps one down and use it to kill it at near death before they have a chance to merge. but merging begins at 50% health and the instakill isn't active until 25% health so that's quite a window of merging to deal with (and you'd need a separate solution for the more basic oozes that merge immediately)

 

3 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

Does potion of impediment work on spells? If so could use scrolls of storm of holy fire or similar spells that throw lots of projectiles over a decent duration, there's so many projectiles that it should be interrupting a lot.

i swear it used to work with spells early on, but on a more recent one i couldn't get it to proc, so i think it's only weapons now. deadeye definitely works with spells, but the proc rate is rather low on its own.

 

3 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

blood mage / berserker looked really interesting because berserker gets tenacious (and hardy) from frenzy

if you're able to get the axe from SSS you don't need to worry about getting berserker (with the hidden health) since you'd be able to instantly always ugprade your frenzy to energized with weapon switching.

 

3 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

Can you explain what you meant about the jester's cap interaction? I was wearing this incidentally for the deflection debuff so the phantom hit more, but I didn't try wall of draining since it was nerfed pretty hard

jester's cap cap of the laughingstock has an aura that lowers everyone's deflection by 10. the way it's implemented though, it shows up as a positive buff on the enemy, and for wall of draining it counts as a buff you can drain duration from (except it has no duration, so it'll stay active and be a perpetual source of +time on your own buffs). again, i don't know if BPM changed how cap of the laughingstock does this aura, since it is a source of cheese.

i mention it because it would give you a lot more time on energized and you can spam a much lower-level (and easier to blood sacrifice spell) like chill fog, where crits would interrupt. you'd need to stack a bunch of +accuracy though (though the last couple times I ran Deadfire I basically did this strategy with a druid, just layering on so many ticking aoes with energized active and preventing HoW from doing much of anything).

what about slicken? has always been a tried-and-true boss interrupt, and it has an aoe (to get multiple oozes), and as a tier 1 spell it should be really easy to restore with blood sacrifice.

 

Edited January 31, 2023 by thelee

[Shai Hulud]

13 hours ago, thelee said:

sorry it was an arbalest. mechanical marvel

 

sorry, when i say "won't prevent HoW splits" i mean it won't prevent *any* split. but you're right, if you're fast, you can dps one down and use it to kill it at near death before they have a chance to merge. but merging begins at 50% health and the instakill isn't active until 25% health so that's quite a window of merging to deal with (and you'd need a separate solution for the more basic oozes that merge immediately)

 

i swear it used to work with spells early on, but on a more recent one i couldn't get it to proc, so i think it's only weapons now. deadeye definitely works with spells, but the proc rate is rather low on its own.

 

if you're able to get the axe from SSS you don't need to worry about getting berserker (with the hidden health) since you'd be able to instantly always ugprade your frenzy to energized with weapon switching.

 

jester's cap cap of the laughingstock has an aura that lowers everyone's deflection by 10. the way it's implemented though, it shows up as a positive buff on the enemy, and for wall of draining it counts as a buff you can drain duration from (except it has no duration, so it'll stay active and be a perpetual source of +time on your own buffs). again, i don't know if BPM changed how cap of the laughingstock does this aura, since it is a source of cheese.

i mention it because it would give you a lot more time on energized and you can spam a much lower-level (and easier to blood sacrifice spell) like chill fog, where crits would interrupt. you'd need to stack a bunch of +accuracy though (though the last couple times I ran Deadfire I basically did this strategy with a druid, just layering on so many ticking aoes with energized active and preventing HoW from doing much of anything).

what about slicken? has always been a tried-and-true boss interrupt, and it has an aoe (to get multiple oozes), and as a tier 1 spell it should be really easy to restore with blood sacrifice.

 

Getting that crossbow is too out of the way for eothas challenge unfortunately. 

Also I think the trial of the changeling may be impossible without removing recovery time. It is very very hard to protect Vela. I'll try it later but I found it kind of hard even with a bunch of SOF procs (conduit, scordeo's, etc.) because the rogue and ranger prioritize her over the changeling. I could do it with SOF procs by starting invisible and in stealth and circling around to the rogue/ranger, killing them, then the others, but I had massive health regen and no recovery time so even without spells I was way stronger. So probably I would have to go seeker or survivor route. I'll try it though...

Slicken could work. Lot of these things would probably work on like a hierophant where my accuracy is higher or I have more hit to crit conversion but reflex is their second highest save. But slicken is a hazard AOE so it might proc some. Definitely works on the little oozes. Maybe stack that and wall of many colors and cast CCDs on top...

I don't think I can crit with accuracy vs anything but deflection unless I proc merciless gaze or uncanny luck, so that's 20%. If I use the pet milx it's 25%. If I did the forgotten sanctum first I could use the necklace The Third Eye which gives an extra +10% for 35%. Yeah I'm going to console that in and try that out. I usually do HOW before Forgotten Sanctum but I think probably that boss is harder for SC blood mage than anything in FS. Does potion of perfect aim stack with merciless gaze? If so that's another 25% but duration isn't real long. I can try extending that and ire of death's herald with wall of draining. It was nerfed but if you line up enough little oozes from symbiote may still get a significant boost. Even if they don't stack perfect aim would give me 45% which is pretty significant. Would be so sick on a blood mage / berserker though, could get 80% hit to crit while frenzied (blood storm), which with high intelligence you only need frenzy every 40 seconds and get back a point of rage from the potion of enlightenment every 30, thus can use stalwart defiance every now and then. Plus they have interrupting blows, one stands alone, savage hunter etc., so they get major damage boosts. Maybe I can script something to tell me when health reaches a certain point. Hmmm...another project. 

Takes a while to test anything out because it takes me like 45 minutes to get through HOW stage. If I console up my might and turn on god mode can probably cut that down a lot, but I have to use kind of passive strategies summoning phantoms so my armor doesn't break. Actually I can just turn off abydon challenge with console, then turn it back on when I get to gigantic ooze stage. Until I figure out the encounter at least. 

Sounds like stacking hit to crit and extending ire of death's herald would work. Then use slicken, chill fog, wall of flame etc. I don't intend to rest though (except I guess in SSS because the slayer's path is probably impossible) so am reluctant using one time abilities, but...probably don't need the interrupts as much for other bosses. I always end up saving things like that in games and then never using it. Even in my vanilla ultimate run I got mien of death's herald for intuitive (got energized from slayer's claw) and had planned to extend it with SOF but I never did it. 

Thanks for all the suggestions. One of these things will work.

[Elric Galad]

I think the very best item for interrupting should be Scourge of Bezzelo, granted that it is dropped by Frightened Child who could be scary to include in a very constrained run. It makes 3 separate rolls, all of them can interrupting with crossbow modal, which reliably interrupt and can even dig through concentration layers. 

Edit : OK you already mentionned it. 

Edited February 1, 2023 by Elric Galad

[thelee]

3 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

But slicken is a hazard AOE so it might proc some

nit: slicken isn't a hazard AoE. it's an AoE with a repeating effect. want to make sure we're precise, because "hazard" has a specific meaning and interacts differently with items and buffs.

 

3 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

Does potion of perfect aim stack with merciless gaze?

yes, but they're not additive. they're independent checks, so you'll have a 1-(.85 * .75) = 36% chance for hit->crit instead of of 15 + 25 = 40% chance.

 

what race are you? for my ultimate i run i chose a boreal dwarf expressly for the hauane o whe fight, which was by far the roughest of all the megabosses when i was planning things out. boreal dwarf gives you a massive 50% miss to graze chance against hauane. would be real useful for landing something like slicken.

 

have you considered scrolls of avenging storm and dual-wielding something? iirc my ultimate attempt was basically dual-wielding, lots of effects to boost accuracy, deadeye, impediment, scordeo's edge buff, avenging storm, and going to town on hauane o whe. basically my entire character was planned just to be able to take on hauane o whe.

[Shai Hulud]

4 hours ago, thelee said:

nit: slicken isn't a hazard AoE. it's an AoE with a repeating effect. want to make sure we're precise, because "hazard" has a specific meaning and interacts differently with items and buffs.

 

yes, but they're not additive. they're independent checks, so you'll have a 1-(.85 * .75) = 36% chance for hit->crit instead of of 15 + 25 = 40% chance.

 

what race are you? for my ultimate i run i chose a boreal dwarf expressly for the hauane o whe fight, which was by far the roughest of all the megabosses when i was planning things out. boreal dwarf gives you a massive 50% miss to graze chance against hauane. would be real useful for landing something like slicken.

 

have you considered scrolls of avenging storm and dual-wielding something? iirc my ultimate attempt was basically dual-wielding, lots of effects to boost accuracy, deadeye, impediment, scordeo's edge buff, avenging storm, and going to town on hauane o whe. basically my entire character was planned just to be able to take on hauane o whe.

I'm a wood elf at the moment but am changing stuff with console frequently and trying different builds. In BPM the moon godlike is actually pretty good for this fight because you take less raw damage from blood sacrifice and you also take less corrode damage from HOW, -25% damage and +4 AR vs corrode. I preferred boreal dwarf in POE1 with the +15 accuracy. 50% miss to graze is probably only useful in this specific fight when you're trying to interrupt with things that interrupt on graze like tornado. Or slicken yeah. Considering how massively high the fortitude and reflex saves are that could actually be pretty useful.

I haven't tried again yet as blood mage. It takes so long to wear down his first form... I made a psion / troubadour and it was the easiest thing ever. HOW never even attacked me, you can start in stealth and just send in the bat things who spit fire until he has a sliver of health left, then psychovampiric shield => borrowed instinct => disintegrate. It didn't even take that long either. Wrote a simple script to summon things and cast pain block by least inspiration and then hit fast mode. Took quite a few tries to land disintegrate but meanwhile I had an endless stream of skeletons running at him with no chance to hit him because their accuracy is like 29. The bats are pretty tough actually but since they're in your party unlike essential phantoms you can direct them to attack specific targets or just sit there and get killed which is super useful.

I'm pretty sure now this would be the easiest way to get through the game legitimately. The instruments of death are pretty decent vs most enemies and vela isn't as big an issue because if you stay in stealth she follows you. With an endless stream of skeletons running off you the AI rarely targets you even if you're unstealthed. SC troubadour would also do well but would probably have trouble with HOW. 

But Pale Shelter already did this build and though he used SOF I'd be doing basically the same thing. 

I do think I have an idea of what will work though with blood mage. After you get hit with symbiote run in a line away from him, cast slicken, drink some potions, ire of death's herald, wall of draining on the symbiotes plus HOW, if you hit all four you should extend the buffs long enough. Second slicken and wall of draining if necessary. Can maybe do a third using potions of enlightenment. Though I haven't really planned past that. I like to just summon citzal's spirit lance and phantoms and beat things to death. If potions of impediment worked on spells it would be pretty easy. But even if not, slicken plus storm of holy fire scrolls will probably work...

How does dual wielding benefit accuracy? Stacking adaptive I guess?  I think BPM fixed this to only apply to Scordeo's Edge. Not totally sure haven't tried it in BPM. Oh, to proc avenging storm. You know I've never played a druid, does this spell stun or interrupt like returning storm? The description just says it attacks anyone you hit or who hits you with a bolt of lightning. Vs. reflex. It's too bad there aren't any AOE spells targeting deflection...not that I can think of anyway. Will would be best after that. But most AOEs target reflex which is his second highest defense. And the hard CCs tend to target fortitude which is his highest. 

Assuming avenging storm interrupts (or I'm energized) that is a good idea since the duration is so long. Then throw down some meteor storms. Probably need a couple stacks of scrolls as it takes too long to recover L9 spells. Energized + citzal's spirit lance also works well on the smaller oozes (massive and smaller). Gigantic ones trying to merge into HOW is probably the worst part. 

Oh how did you deal with Vela in your ultimate attempt? In mine I had infinite withdraw casts so it was easy. If you're summoning stuff offscreen it is also easy. Harder with a character that fights directly because she tends to wander into the field of fire. I did manage to get her to stay in the upper right section but it was kind of difficult, had to temporal cocoon her and then attack HOW from the bottom left and kite him really far away, but Vela inevitably still comes running towards you. Think I'm doing something wrong as my success in keeping her in the corner has been pretty random. 

 

Edited February 1, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[thelee]

31 minutes ago, Shai Hulud said:

How does dual wielding benefit accuracy?

not about accuracy, but about maximizing procs/second

 

31 minutes ago, Shai Hulud said:

You know I've never played a druid, does this spell stun or interrupt like returning storm? The description just says it attacks anyone you hit or who hits you with a bolt of lightning. Vs. reflex.

avenging storm procs count as "weapon" attacks (if you're not aware, there's some infinite damage cheese that you can do with this fact combined with the 2h sword Effort). so it can trigger interrupt off impediment. it's also a bonus source of damage.

so with potion of impediment, deadeye, and high speed (i had scordeo's edge buff, so ultimately dual wielding didn't even matter i guess, i was just dual wielding because that's skaen's spiritual weapon) you get the possibility to interrupt from the weapon, and an additional chacne to interrupt from the avenging storm hit. especially after the initial ooze form splits and defenses lower, it can be a massive aid.

i looked up my own run again just to verify that potion of impediment does in fact work with avenging storm and can be effective: 

 

 

36 minutes ago, Shai Hulud said:

Oh how did you deal with Vela in your ultimate attempt? In mine I had infinite withdraw casts so it was easy. If you're summoning stuff offscreen it is also easy. Harder with a character that fights directly because she tends to wander into the field of fire.

it varied. i could have infinite withdraw casts because i was part tactician, but really i had to manage that pretty carefully since in my practice runs i could run into a situation where the wrong spell gets restored by brilliant, or i'm starting a fight without a sufficient withdraw cast because i didn't restore enough spells in the last fight. i think generally i tried to aggro enemies so that vela gets scared, withdraw her, and then lure enemies far far away from her so that i don't have to worry about re-withdrawing her and can just focus on getting back up to full withdraw and restoring my own resources.

[Shai Hulud]

21 minutes ago, thelee said:

not about accuracy, but about maximizing procs/second

 

avenging storm procs count as "weapon" attacks (if you're not aware, there's some infinite damage cheese that you can do with this fact combined with the 2h sword Effort). so it can trigger interrupt off impediment. it's also a bonus source of damage.

so with potion of impediment, deadeye, and high speed (i had scordeo's edge buff, so ultimately dual wielding didn't even matter i guess, i was just dual wielding because that's skaen's spiritual weapon) you get the possibility to interrupt from the weapon, and an additional chacne to interrupt from the avenging storm hit. especially after the initial ooze form splits and defenses lower, it can be a massive aid.

i looked up my own run again just to verify that potion of impediment does in fact work with avenging storm and can be effective: 

 

 

it varied. i could have infinite withdraw casts because i was part tactician, but really i had to manage that pretty carefully since in my practice runs i could run into a situation where the wrong spell gets restored by brilliant, or i'm starting a fight without a sufficient withdraw cast because i didn't restore enough spells in the last fight. i think generally i tried to aggro enemies so that vela gets scared, withdraw her, and then lure enemies far far away from her so that i don't have to worry about re-withdrawing her and can just focus on getting back up to full withdraw and restoring my own resources.

I can't believe I haven't seen this already. I've watched at least parts of nearly every ultimate run, but never watched yours, I guess because I never tried a tactician or skaen/anything but messed around with lot of blood mages, ciphers, chanters, and monks. Your detailed notes are awesome and I wish I'd discovered them earlier.

I had similar issues with restoring spells with blood mage / soul blade. I ended up scripting blood sacrifice to go off periodically and blood sacrificed three times at the end of every fight. Actually scripted everything. I practiced fights at first but stopped after a while because the game was kind of hilariously easy once I'd procced enough SOF cheese and got citzal's spirit lance. Lost a bunch of my buffs when I landed on Ukaizo and forgot about the forced rest, rushed into battle because "ah my script can handle it", I nearly wiped on that fight lol...

See my problem I'm having with vela is even if I temporal cocoon her in the top right corner (like in HOW map), then run to the bottom left, kite HOW way down, she still ends up wandering pretty close to the center of the map and HOW chucks a symbiote at her, and she's stupid so she runs around and then is surrounded by oozes and gets murdered. The only way I've been able to deal with vela consistently (in this fight anyway) is to do most of the fight stealthed. I can send in phantoms and blood sacrifice in stealth, buff the phantoms from stealth, etc. Was also easy with the troubadour/psion because she stays with me and I didn't go near HOW in that one. My blood mage does have infinite withdraw casts since I stole that spell but I'm trying to figure out how to do it without that, and some fights are so grindy I don't think you can have enough withdraw scrolls. I know if you can start combat with vela far away sometimes she stays there, so like you used to be able to summon the fire blight with the magran's belt and that would scare vela and she'd stay in that area, but BPM changed the belt. Or I thought it did...but I don't see it in the notes. Hmm. Still, that is a very tedious method trying to proc the 1%...

Watched the fight. That took you half an hour without recovery time. It's going to take me HOURS. Why didn't you use Marux Amanth on HOW? Can't sacrifice destroy him? But you have to be paladin / priest / rogue. 

I'm tempted to forget the SC blood mage and do a hierophant again or loremaster, warlock, sage, something that boosts my accuracy and crits or else healing. Hierophant has way more accuracy and defense, loremaster gets energized plus healing and summons, warlock gets tons of damage boosts and healing, sage gets thunderous blows and other monk goodies. I feel like weapons scale better than spells and you don't have to worry about restoring them, which is much harder in BPM since it takes longer, has lower chance to recover high level spells, and prevents healing for 6 seconds per cast. I mean I went SC blood mage mostly for major grimoire imprint but when I actually got to the point where I stole shadowing beyond, champion's boon, salvation of time, barring death's door, minor avatar etc. etc. (basically your whole spellbook) the challenge just disappeared and I was like what's the point. But now IDK what's the point of staying SC blood mage. The high level spells aren't that good and they're hard to restore. The only real benefit is you get two L7 casts instead of 1, and L7 spells are 1/3 chance to restore so that is a little significant if you're trying to use wall of draining a lot, but if I went MC I'd probably be melee focused. 

I'll at least try SC blood mage though. Didn't realize you could extend avenging storm.

[abot]

About Vela. Best way is usually a trap keeping stealth (usually needs at least 14/15 stealth, the more the better). When in stealth you can hover the cursor on enemy and see detection radius, try to place the trap out of radius first, some enemies (humans usually) are more curious, but most of them turn back fast. When they turn back it is easier to place a second trap inside the detection circle. 2nd best way if your stealth is not enough is stll a trap + a bomb nearby (not a spark one as Vela will be curious about that LOL), so you can throw the luring bomb from a distance and go away faster, you will not always be able to keep stealth but Vela should follow you to safety faster.
Blue (not yet aggroed) enemies can be done planting a bomb with AI off, shift + click pickpocket 
If you have enough map space between your position and the enemy you can also try charming Vela (you can use a whale of a wand if you can target her with any spell). It is risky as she will start looking for a fight, but if you are far enough from enemy she should stop nearby. Then she will still stay there until you change map, and that can be very useful (you can even place a trap without her following you).
 

Edited February 2, 2023 by abot

[Shai Hulud]

39 minutes ago, abot said:

About Vela. Best way is usually a trap keeping stealth (usually needs at least 14/15 stealth, the more the better). When in stealth you can hover the cursor on enemy and see detection radius, try to place the trap out of radius first, some enemies (humans usually) are more curious, but most of them turn back fast. When they turn back it is easier to place a second trap inside the detection circle. 2nd best way if your stealth is not enough is stll a trap + a bomb nearby (not a spark one as Vela will be curious about that LOL), so you can throw the luring bomb from a distance and go away faster, you will not always be able to keep stealth but Vela should follow you to safety faster.
Blue (not yet aggroed) enemies can be done planting a bomb with AI off, shift + click pickpocket 
If you have enough map space between your position and the enemy you can also try charming Vela (you can use a whale of a wand if you can target her with any spell). It is risky as she will start looking for a fight, but if you are far enough from enemy she should stop nearby. Then she will still stay there until you change map, and that can be very useful (you can even place a trap without her following you).
 

Sorry I'm not understanding the first strategy with the traps. If I lure enemies with traps Vela just follows me, right? I'm missing something...do you do this in a particular video in your ultimate run? I can look it up. I've seen you use the fire blight and maybe the wand. Don't remember the traps but I've only watched some of the major battles.

And yeah I've blown up Vela with the sparkcrackers before lol. Was trying to lure enemies to a gunpowder barrel.

Edit: Whoa just saw you reverse pickpocket a bomb on one of Concelhaut's dudes, no idea you could do that. You had summons though, won't Vela just keep following me if I do that and then go into combat? I've used Halt and Binding Web and lots of stuff like that to try to keep her in place but a lot of the time she comes running toward me mid battle. Only super reliable method I've found is casting withdraw over and over.

Edit 2: Okay I get the trap thing now, the second one starts combat but you and vela are still stealthed and you can lead her away. Still, how does this make her stay there? I've tried unstealth / stealth to start combat stealthed on HOW map and she still follows me, so how am I supposed to fight anyone without unstealthing her?

Edited February 2, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[thelee]

2 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

See my problem I'm having with vela is even if I temporal cocoon her in the top right corner (like in HOW map), then run to the bottom left, kite HOW way down, she still ends up wandering pretty close to the center of the map and HOW chucks a symbiote at her

Maybe dumb question: are you letting vela get scared before you kite? Her scared AI shouldn’t wander that much, whereas her normal AI will try to find you (and then getting scared when an enemy is in range). I dragged Vela with me to aggro HoW so I could trigger her fear, I withdrew her, and then kited. It was pretty foolproof in terms of safety 

 

[Shai Hulud]

1 hour ago, thelee said:

Maybe dumb question: are you letting vela get scared before you kite? Her scared AI shouldn’t wander that much, whereas her normal AI will try to find you (and then getting scared when an enemy is in range). I dragged Vela with me to aggro HoW so I could trigger her fear, I withdrew her, and then kited. It was pretty foolproof in terms of safety 

 

Maybe, because sometimes she stays near the corner. But getting her scared without getting her near the big blob in the middle of the map is kinda hard. How do you do that? And if you trigger her near HOW you'd have to get him all the way into a corner. Actually I think I did that on one of the attempts where I made it to the second stage... I went to the bottom left corner and I could barely see anything because of all the icons. 

I just tried a couple times with SC blood mage. Strategy is stealth buff long-lasting spells and potion of enlightenment / impediment / perfect aim then cast blood sacrifice to regain as many levels as possible and trigger llengrath's safeguard, heal a bit, unstealth, get hit with symbiote, try to bunch the 3 lesser oozes together, cast slicken, it hits the lesser oozes 100%, then the shorter buffs like arcane veil and eldritch aim, moonwell scroll, avenging storm, wall of draining, recast slicken, wall of draining when first one is out. Unlikely to get a third one unless I blood sacrifice a bunch which would leave me pretty low health. That's what I tried last time and died before got third cast (didn't get it back). Only source of healing was moonwell and blood mage passive and blood sacrifice turns off both for 6s. If you hit all four with the wall of draining you get maybe +15 to 20 seconds per effect which is just not enough. Even if I hit all four, the buffs will all run out before I kill stage 1 of HOW. Maybe this strategy is bad now. I mean old blood mage builds were mostly centered around extending potion of the final stand (plus scordeo's etc.) and if you watch videos people usually have very little health and would have died many times without it. I can barely extend moonwell.

Might make more sense to kill HOW form without the buffs and keep my spells (is doable, but takes a long time) using phantoms and finality's claim ring so HOW damages himself. When he's near death, let my spells restore (mostly just phantom). Then I do the wall of draining stuff on the gigantic oozes. But the problem with that is I'm not sure if they cast symbiote...and hitting just two oozes is not enough. I mean I could leave the symbiotes from stage 1 alone if the phantom spawned any, but they probably have merged into just one or two by then. IDK, maybe it would work, but killing HOW now is 100X harder than it used to be. Except with the troubadour / psion, with that one I got it first try with almost no pausing.

Maybe I'll try this again tomorrow but at the moment I am really frustrated with this boss and considering doing a troubadour / psion run. The great thing about that is recovery time barely matters because you don't need to spam summons. It only matters for the cipher spells and even then not that much because you still gain focus slower than you can use it. So the BPM nerfs affect the build very little (brisk recitation is slightly worse) but there are also summoning buffs that make the summons more viable, and they're summoned a little faster since quick summoning is better. And unlike a wizard's essential phantom, animancy cat actually gives bonus might and pen to chanter summons.

@Elric Galad

Suggestion here regarding potions of enlightenment, I know you were trying to make single classes more appealing, so would it be possible to give back more resources or give them back faster for single class builds? The potions are extremely strong for like a barbarian/monk where you get back mortification + rage (+ wounds?) every 30s, so if you started with 10 of each you get back 10% resources every 30s per class. This potion makes a lot of multiclass builds pretty appealing like wizard / barbarian only loses L8 and L9 spells and in exchange if your INT is high enough you can have perma-frenzy and perma-savage defiance for a truckload of healing and extra speed / damage. And I think that's great, but then you use the potion on the single class chars and it is half as good. Worse on casters. A l20 druid typically has 18ish spells and you get back 1 every 30s, and unlike pools like rage you don't get to then pick the spell to use the resource on, it's random.

So...possible balance is to give single classes 2 resource per 30s or 1 resource per 15 or 20s. 

Edited February 2, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[thelee]

15 minutes ago, Shai Hulud said:

But getting her scared without getting her near the big blob in the middle of the map is kinda hard. How do you do that? And if you trigger her near HOW you'd have to get him all the way into a corner.

if you skip to 20:30 in my video you can see what i do.

 

17 minutes ago, Shai Hulud said:

I mean old blood mage builds were mostly centered around extending potion of the final stand (plus scordeo's etc.) and if you watch videos people usually have very little health and would have died many times without it. I can barely extend moonwell.

sorry i don't recall the extent to which bpm nerfs various things but, what about that wand that has a barring death's door effect? could you use that in conjunction with your 4x ooze wall of draining to give you a lot more blood sacrifices?

[Shai Hulud]

14 minutes ago, thelee said:

if you skip to 20:30 in my video you can see what i do.

 

sorry i don't recall the extent to which bpm nerfs various things but, what about that wand that has a barring death's door effect? could you use that in conjunction with your 4x ooze wall of draining to give you a lot more blood sacrifices?

Ah you cast withdraw on her then kite him. Yes this works but I don't have withdraw, also temporal cocoon is a 7 second cast so I'd probably get some damage doing it that close to him, but if that's the only way to do it I guess I take some damage. Might mess up the symbiote thing though. Hmm maybe I can cast it while stealthed, removing most of the recovery, but...if Vela is cocooned does she still get scared if I unstealth? Which brings up the philosophical question, if a mountainous ooze attacks you but Vela is too cocooned to notice, did it really happen?

That is a good thought with the wand but all the barring death door effects have been replaced by fixed duration damage shields. Also blood sacrifice has a 3 second cooldown and .8 second cast so not as spammable as it used to be. If you happened to be near death it could buy you a couple casts, but then afterward there's a 6 second duration where you can't heal, so...yeah. Much preferred the old blood sacrifice but I like new challenges.

May not be clear from the image but the way the damage shield works is it doesn't trigger until near death so you'd still take a lot of damage unless you were already near death I think.

Edited February 2, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[thelee]

13 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

Hmm maybe I can cast it while stealthed, removing most of the recovery, but...if Vela is cocooned does she still get scared if I unstealth?

nope  she'll run over to you first before getting scared. important that she freaks out first

 

lordy you got a pickle of a challenge here. how far have you been able to get throughout all your iterations?

another thing possible consideration is cinder bombs. unless BPM changed it, the explosion itself will interrupt, without a roll, so it really doesn't matter how good your explosives skill is. it could act as an extra source of interrupt that you don't have to resource-gen for, for stopping merges.

Edited February 2, 2023 by thelee

[abot]

It's been a while, so I just re-tested the starting of Hauani battle. There are a few possibilities.
You can place a trap from stealth as usual (disable AI, click where to place the trap, shift click ASAP to the safe location  so you can enqueue actions and do it as fast as possible).
Hauani is a little different in that her detection radius is just like her huge size, but even if scary you can place the trap well inside Hauani radius/blob, when trap is near enough the center of Hauani the trap will trigger, I managed to start the fight safely with 14 stealth, a couple steps inside her detection radius.
Pros of placing a trap from stealth are you keep your stealth so you can cast super fast and send (e.g. painlinked) summons. Problem is if you start applying direct damage to Hauani you and Vela will go out of stealth/Vela will follow you and Hauani has ranged attacks.
So all in all best strategy is to try and keep Vela to the map border.
A common way is 1% trigger of Magran belt fire blight. A better way I found is charming Vela, she should be far enough to not run fighting Hauani (if you can't directly charm her use e.g. whale of a wand spamming a spell on her e.g. Psychovampiric Shield). If you manage to charm (5% is not bad) her combat will start and she will stay there when she stops. You can send summons directly while she is still charmed or (better) wait for the charm to expire. She will stay there and you can now place a trap having her not following you any more
Note: the charming does not always work, I never managed to get it working with Belranga, not enough distance, Vela will try to kill Belranga or Belranga minions
 

Edited February 2, 2023 by abot

[Shai Hulud]

1 hour ago, abot said:

It's been a while, so I just re-tested the starting of Hauani battle. There are a few possibilities.
You can place a trap from stealth as usual (disable AI, click where to place the trap, shift click ASAP to the safe location  so you can enqueue actions and do it as fast as possible).
Hauani is a little different in that her detection radius is just like her huge size, but even if scary you can place the trap well inside Hauani radius/blob, when trap is near enough the center of Hauani the trap will trigger, I managed to start the fight safely with 14 stealth, a couple steps inside her detection radius.
Pros of placing a trap from stealth are you keep your stealth so you can cast super fast and send (e.g. painlinked) summons. Problem is if you start applying direct damage to Hauani you and Vela will go out of stealth/Vela will follow you and Hauani has ranged attacks.
So all in all best strategy is to try and keep Vela to the map border.
A common way is 1% trigger of Magran belt fire blight. A better way I found is charming Vela, she should be far enough to not run fighting Hauani (if you can't directly charm her use e.g. whale of a wand spamming a spell on her e.g. Psychovampiric Shield). If you manage to charm (5% is not bad) her combat will start and she will stay there when she stops. You can send summons directly while she is still charmed or (better) wait for the charm to expire. She will stay there and you can now place a trap having her not following you any more
Note: the charming does not always work, I never managed to get it working with Belranga, not enough distance, Vela will try to kill Belranga or Belranga minions
 

Can't you just unstealth / stealth close to HOW (or whoever) to get the same effect and start battle stealthed? But yeah I often have the problem that Vela falls out of stealth before I do. I think the fire blight thing might have been removed in BPM...like maybe it only spawns in combat? I'm not sure, feel like I read that somewhere but I'll try it. 

The charming thing sounds like a good idea. Gotta kill Concelhaut to get that wand though, but they start blue so I can just reverse pickpocket a guy with a bomb, that's a cool trick.

Speaking of pain link, I was fighting Dorodugan with pain linked summons and noticed he was taking way less damage than it seemed he should be. Like he was regularly dealing 600ish damage to pain linked summons from some of his abilities but didn't seem to take any damage at all. I only see the red damage tick if he does a regular weapon attack. Abilities like Brutal Cleave and the Helfire Explosions don't proc it at all, but the description of pain link doesn't distinguish between types of damage, it *should* be damaging on weapon attacks, spells, abilities, everything. Did you notice this or am I imagining things? I'm hesitant to report another bug to elric because the last couple times I was mistaken.

But I cast pain link on an animated weapon and tried soul ignition and disintegration and they didn't damage me, but attacking the summon with weapons did. Granted I only tested these abilities and dorodugan so small sample but seems like the ability is bugged or the description is wrong. That battle seems like it will take absolutely ages with pain link only working on direct weapon attacks. Tried proccing chill fog with grave calling and all that but it hardly ever hits. Normally when I fight him I have super high weapon accuracy, no recovery and 300% damage from conduit and massive passive healing etc. so he is not that tough, but fighting him with summons...IDK I spent about half an hour and he'd only lost like maybe 10% health. Fighting HOW is strangely very easy with summons. 

  

2 hours ago, thelee said:

nope  she'll run over to you first before getting scared. important that she freaks out first

 

lordy you got a pickle of a challenge here. how far have you been able to get throughout all your iterations?

another thing possible consideration is cinder bombs. unless BPM changed it, the explosion itself will interrupt, without a roll, so it really doesn't matter how good your explosives skill is. it could act as an extra source of interrupt that you don't have to resource-gen for, for stopping merges.

Haven't gotten past the gigantic oozes at like 1/3 health, and I've gotten to that point three times. At least with the blood mage. And I've tried some other builds that don't even get that far. Like some tanky builds that work until their armor breaks and then they quickly die. 

Only build I've beaten him on without cheese is psion / troubadour. (Also pretty sure I can beat him with hierophant). I don't think BPM changed cinder bombs. One problem I'm having with this battle as a mage is I need to carry at least a couple grimoires in my pocket which limits how many potions and scrolls I can take. Tried using Giftbearer Cloth and even took community patch ability extra pocket so I have all 6 slots but is still like llengrath grimoire, arkemyr grimoire, concelhaut, ninagauth, potion of enlightenment, potion of impediment, potion of perfect aim, and I'm already out of space. Can drop two of arkemyr, concelhaut, ninagauth grimoires if I memorize more spells but still can only carry so much. What would you prioritize here? Avenging storm seems pretty good, but mostly because of the potion of impediment, perfect aim seems important. The enlightenment potion is extremely useful. Just not much room.

Edited February 2, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[abot]

Yeah, killing Dorudugan without 0 recovery from cheesy prolonging some effect is probably one of the most challenging things, not sure it's possible.
I think with a chanter/troubadour it is essential to try and keep Doru blocked/surrounded by 3 summons while the other ones/the player try to get the fire bombs away from him so he can't move where the bombs can explode and heal him. There are still attacks that you can't control where he fires the terrain, but limiting the bombs healing is already a huge help
Best way to use the painlinked wurms with him/the fire dragon/the lich dragon or anything super tough with engagement is to move the wurms so they get engaged and disengage them ASAP so they get disengage attack crits, they should die in 3/4 melee hits and do almost 25% of their health as damage
(unless you are unlucky and you are fighting a vampiric enemy, then painlink is less useful)

Edited February 2, 2023 by abot

[Shai Hulud]

8 hours ago, abot said:

Yeah, killing Dorudugan without 0 recovery from cheesy prolonging some effect is probably one of the most challenging things, not sure it's possible.
I think with a chanter/troubadour it is essential to try and keep Doru blocked/surrounded by 3 summons while the other ones/the player try to get the fire bombs away from him so he can't move where the bombs can explode and heal him. There are still attacks that you can't control where he fires the terrain, but limiting the bombs healing is already a huge help
Best way to use the painlinked wurms with him/the fire dragon/the lich dragon or anything super tough with engagement is to move the wurms so they get engaged and disengage them ASAP so they get disengage attack crits, they should die in 3/4 melee hits and do almost 25% of their health as damage
(unless you are unlucky and you are fighting a vampiric enemy, then painlink is less useful)

It should be possible if pain link worked like the description...damage is also bumped up in BPM to 30%, so every time he kills your summons if all three are pain linked he should do about 540ish damage to himself. He has like 7k health or something like that so about 13 cycles should do it. Less if we're applying other sources of damage. But I tried after that many cycles and he was still "healthy" with first bar only like 1/2 gone. Maybe in part that's due to him being healed by Helfire Iron but I know pain link is doing way less damage than it should.

That is a good idea to proc the disengagement attacks for pain link but it really shouldn't be that micro intensive. The description is wrong or it's bugged. Says "Allied Target: 25% of Damage Taken is dealt to attackers for 15.0 sec" in vanilla and in BPM the ability is buffed to double duration and 30% damage. But I've tested it enough now to be certain the ability is not being implemented correctly.

@Elric Galad

Hey, even though the last couple "bugs" I reported were kinda not (sorry), I'm pretty sure this one is (though it is also present in vanilla). Checked BPM and CP notes on Pain Link and found nothing relevant. Basically Pain Link description does not discriminate between sources of damage for whatever is pain linked, but it seems kinda bugged in what damages apply, for instance Dorodugan's Brutal Cleave and Helfire Barrage do a very small amount of damage to self compared with the total damage, which led me to...

Testing pain link on myself since I could actually see my own health by casting pain link on animated summons. Attacking them with a weapon results in expected damage but abilities were hit and miss. Soul Ignition and Disintegrate result in no self damage while mind lance and detonate do. Then tried some scrolls and necklace of fireballs. Tried scroll of storm of holy fire, embrace of the earth talon, tornado, meteor shower, and ray of fire. They all did damage but the AOE spells do not proc pain link correctly. Tornado for instance I cast on 3 pain linked animated weapons, hit all three for a total of 87 + 102 + 108 = 297 damage, and I took 26 damage, which coincidentally is about 30% of 87... Seems pretty clear with AOEs only the first hit is procced, and this appears to be true even when the ability can hit repeatdely like Helfire Barrage or Meteor Shower. And if you kill the target it also doesn't seem to proc.

Can't test everything but based on my smallish sample it looks like

1) Pain Link does not proc at all if target dies
2) Pain Link DOTs do not proc damage at all
3) Pain Link AOEs proc only the first hit

As a result against enemies with a variety of attacks and ones likely to kill (e.g. Dorodugan and Helfire Barrage + Brutal Cleave), Pain Link results in far less damage done to the attacker than should be applied. Dorodugan wipes out three 600ish health animated weapons with pain link, theoretically he should take 1800*.3 = 540 damage but he takes none if the ability kills the weapon and only 1/3 damage (10% or less) on AOEs that don't kill and/or hit more than once.

Edited February 3, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[Boeroer]

I don't use Pain Link much (dare I say "never"?), so this might be false, but since Pain Link doesn't seem to do raw dmg, maybe it has the same PEN value as the original attack and has to go through AR again? Could it be that the dmg of Pain Link underpenetrates due to the high AR of D.?

Also, if the calculation is done like "let's "substract" 70% of the dmg in order to retain 30%" then - if the usual double inversion mechanics with maluses get applied - the remaining dmg portion would be way smaller (see Underpenetration, Grazes and dmg reduction in general). 

Just two random ideas that came to my mind to explain the low numbers.

You can defeat D. without massive cheese with Lover's Embrace from Stealth and then hiding. I don't think BPM nerfed that. It takes many hours though - but you can just go elsewhere and return later. Make sure to make yourself immune to pulling (fitting helmet or belt) to not accidentially get pulled out of hiding.

Also D. hitting himself with fire attacks repeatedly prolongs things a lot as you suspected. 

 

 

Edited February 3, 2023 by Boeroer

[Shai Hulud]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

I don't use Pain Link much (dare I say "never"?), so this might be false, but since Pain Link doesn't seem to do raw dmg, maybe it has the same PEN value as the original attack and has to go through AR again? Could it be that the dmg of Pain Link underpenetrates due to the high AR of D.?

Also, if the calculation is done like "let's "substract" 70% of the dmg in order to retain 30%" then - if the usual double inversion mechanics with maluses get applied - the remaining dmg portion would be way smaller (see Underpenetration, Grazes and dmg reduction in general). 

Just two random ideas that came to my mind to explain the low numbers.

You can defeat D. without massive cheese with Lover's Embrace from Stealth and then hiding. I don't think BPM nerfed that. It takes many hours though - but you can just go elsewhere and return later. Make sure to make yourself immune to pulling (fitting helmet or belt) to not accidentially get pulled out of hiding.

Also D. hitting himself with fire attacks repeatedly prolongs things a lot as you suspected. 

 

 

Pain Link bypasses AR, it just does 25 or 30% (vanilla / BPM) of damage applied but only truly works as described on single target attacks that don't kill. And with a guy like Dorodugan he often outright kills things and the ability doesn't proc at all. 

Lover's Embrace is not massive cheese?

You're right about his fire attacks healing prolonging things but he should still take more damage than received if pain link procced on all the fire explosions and not just the first. Pain Link procs while they don't show in the log they do generate a brief red damage tick over the enemy, like below. This brutal cleave crits two of the animated weapons (all have pain link) for 169 damage but only does 24 damage (should be 52), which is 30% of 79, so it is clearly just proccing the first one it hits with pain link (the skeletons can't be pain linked they're just fodder). Normally I'd position all three to get hit but it doesn't make any difference for return damage. Theoretically brutal cleave should damage Dorodugan about 75 per attack if it hits all three weapons, but often it kills one or more and only procs once anyway so it either returns 0% or 1/3 the amount it should depending if the one(s) killed were the first hit.

Helfire barrage is even worse.

Got a helfire barrage pic in next post, no room to post it here, but you can see how the ability *really* doesn't work in that one, he ends up healing more damage than he takes from pain link, so in that case the ability is working infinitely worse than it should.

Edited February 3, 2023 by Shai Hulud