Interrupt Build?

[cctobias]

As a point of reference I have cleared Od Nua 1,2,3, and 4 with the 1pr/1ch/4rng party I mentioned above.  On hard at main lvl  5 and party lvl 4.  I haven't done Raedrics yet.

 

Clearing the ogres was fairly rough.  Strangely although some people find them easy to interrupt, they are not actually easier to "shutdown".  You can foil that big ass swing of theirs but they will eventually channel (whatever that purple swirly icon is) a large hit out.  But I was able to "tank" 4 ogre pulls using chokepoints and a wall of stags.  

 

The combination of Priest and interrupt and their OK DR makes it work surprising ok.  I am currently suffering from two big issues, lack of DR penetration and lack of real AOE (priest has some).  Both of those have some remedies via better equipment or scrolls.

 

Considering I am running no tanks and only one true caster and everyone has like 5 Con, its pretty persuasive for how strong of a mitigating strategy a few interupt rangers + priest is.  You do need the priest though.  A couple animal companions + interrupt + consecrated ground is pretty strong.

 

I was thinking a variant of 1 priest 3 rangers and two mages might really killer (possibly battle mages).  OF course 6 melee focused mages is probably really killer too.  

 

 

As might be expected and was mentioned in this thread certain large encounters are pretty rough.  The one on levle 2 that involves 4 wurms and something like 6 melee/ranged xaurips was probably the worst although the 1 ogre + 2 ogre druids was pretty bad too.  That 4 wurms one was just plain too much in the way of high damage ranged coming me.  I couldn't find a neat way of making it work, so I spilt my stags from my party and had everyone go melee.  I had the stag come from one direction and distract two wurms and a priest while I bum rushed the other two wurms with melee rangers and threw out some priest AoEs.

 

Level 4 was easy.  Trolls are no real problem and as long as I lay covering fire on the adra beetle the beetles are manageable, but slow to kill. 

 

 

Edit:

For the 1 ogre + 2 ogre druid, since I am not really hitting hard against their 10 DR, the chokepoint method didn't work so well.  Eventually the druids, and this can take a while, will do some series of nasty spells and mess you up.  If I killed faster it'd be fine (everyone has 16 or high might so I could do something like massive arbalest alpha on them).  So instead I split the party 2 party per ogre and one stag per ogre.  This was fairly messy and did not shut them down that well but it worked ok.  Considering ogres can one shot my normal party members at this level (had them hit for 68 damage before).

Edited May 9, 2015 by cctobias

[Kaigen42]

Edit:

For the 1 ogre + 2 ogre druid, since I am not really hitting hard against their 10 DR, the chokepoint method didn't work so well.  Eventually the druids, and this can take a while, will do some series of nasty spells and mess you up.  If I killed faster it'd be fine (everyone has 16 or high might so I could do something like massive arbalest alpha on them).  So instead I split the party 2 party per ogre and one stag per ogre.  This was fairly messy and did not shut them down that well but it worked ok.  Considering ogres can one shot my normal party members at this level (had them hit for 68 damage before).

 

Multi-Druid encounters are the bane of my existence, because if you don't manage to lock them all down you're going to lose a big chunk of health off of your whole party more often than not. It sounds like having at least one Wizard would really help this group out, as spells like Slicken are really important for dealing with big groups of annoying enemies, especially since Scrolls of Paralysis have been bumped to a higher Lore level and weakened.

[cctobias]

 

Edit:

For the 1 ogre + 2 ogre druid, since I am not really hitting hard against their 10 DR, the chokepoint method didn't work so well.  Eventually the druids, and this can take a while, will do some series of nasty spells and mess you up.  If I killed faster it'd be fine (everyone has 16 or high might so I could do something like massive arbalest alpha on them).  So instead I split the party 2 party per ogre and one stag per ogre.  This was fairly messy and did not shut them down that well but it worked ok.  Considering ogres can one shot my normal party members at this level (had them hit for 68 damage before).

 

Multi-Druid encounters are the bane of my existence, because if you don't manage to lock them all down you're going to lose a big chunk of health off of your whole party more often than not. It sounds like having at least one Wizard would really help this group out, as spells like Slicken are really important for dealing with big groups of annoying enemies, especially since Scrolls of Paralysis have been bumped to a higher Lore level and weakened.

 

 

Yeah that is what I was thinking is basically slicken + a couple nice AoEs can make certain things much nicer.  Most likely swapping the chanter for a wizard would be a better party.  On the other hand part of the fun is only having one real caster, and that caster is a mini-rogue as well.   I have to say priest of Skaen is pretty cool when you have 4 AC's to draw all kinds of attention.  And all my guys have 18+ dex and wear clothing, so they get things off fast even in the thick of it.

 

With the druids yeah, basically if you let it drag on they will do that Maw spell that does massive damage and prones people or that stag horn spell.  And another problem is moonwell if you are not killing them fast (which with over 300 end is kind of hard to do on two of them).  However in my double druid fights i will say it can take them a rather long time to get to cast Maw.

 

Also to some extent with later priest "trap" spells it may be moot.  

 

I really wish the rangers had a third weapon slot though (I could maybe still get it, tough choice) because hunting is certainly best ranged interupt but man would a crossbow do way more damage.  The party destroys stuff at range with low DR, but around DR8 or so its a real steep fall off.  In the end melee is like double the interrupt throughput though.  I may scrap hunting bows entirely.  They do interrupt pretty decent, but you gotta kill stuff.

[cctobias]

well I have gotten my 4 ranger/preist/chanter party through od nua 8 (just hit level 8 and I can make the following observations:

 

- switching to higher damage ranged was a good idea.

- Ithink rangers with swift aim (50% reload) and chanter chant (20% reload) may shoot arbalests almost as fast crossbows

- 4 animal companions is WAY better at tanking than I figured it would be from forum complaints about AC, with some support they can do fine against that 5 adra beetle spawn on Od Nua 8 (keeping in mind they are weak to pierce so favorable to ranged )

- now that i have level 4 priests spells and a few figurines I am fairly sure I can deal with things that can be problematic due to large numbes of opponents or two many spellcasters, basically the priest can spam out a burn/blind trap and beacon for a good 100 burn aoe, and then shoot that 25 point heal/freeze lvl 2 spell for around another 100, summon 3 wood, 1 adra beetel and 3 shades from figurines + 4 stags and there are just so many targets that your NPCs can melee pretty well and since they all interrupt enough on their own to slow down attack by about 50%, it can be much more effective.  Usually preface this startegy by a massive ranged spike on something annoying spellcaster or charmer.

- I have not actually been able to successfully stop fampyr's from charming my preist, they do it immediately, always target the priest and even with a spike from stealth I have stopped them.  I think perhaps I need to spike from stealth without sending stags forward

- ranged interrupt helps but you can't rely on it to stop spells, even with a lot of it.  You can seriously reduce ranged damage with it.  3guys shooting at two rangers will reduce damage you take a whole lot.  If your stags did not grab aggro from some rangers then shooting at them is usually pretty good, you probably want to do that anyway.

 

Currently I am using 1 warbow(adv focus), 1 fine crosbbow and 2 fine arbalests on the ragners(may switch xbow to arba), Priest has that fine scepter with +20% speed and chanter has fine warbow(adv focus).  Ranger always have swift aim going.  In certain circumstances the entire (or partial when there is not enough room) party goes melee (most fights in wailing banshee).  This seems like a good mix as its decently damaging but has varying attack speeds to low down large pressure on things.

 

Another thing to note is the Vile Lone Lance has 1.0 interrupt but is a spear, not sure if that is accurate(it seems to be from eyeballing the progress bar), but it has morningstar level interupt on a average onehander, which is pretty amazing.

 

Also another thing to note is with Noble focus and Deaneys + march dagger you have two accurate weapons with +20% speed, so on a ranger with swift aim you attack pretty fast with really high accuracy (especially if you pet is attacking same target).  The damage often sucks though.  Having a ranger setup like this is not enough to shut something down, but as a pure guesstimate it seems like it slows things down by like 75% maybe, even so a phantom hits hard and attacks fast, so a ranger like this will still take a lot of end damage when they have no real DR to speak of (like mine do) against such an opponent.  At the same time they last a while and rarely get stunned in such a one-on-one. 

 

All in all its actually a pretty fun party, its effective and versatile but also needs to be used right, do it one way things go south fast do it another and you are fine and only your stags took damage.  You often lose one stag, sometimes lose 2, in some cases lose em all but usually if you go full melee press and accept some health damage you can extend your stags a lot if you are in a bad situations (and also be smart with the priest).  And while I often use the stags to tank I also sometimes do a full on 10 actor brawl as well.  Its definitely a bit of a different play through than a typical tank and caster playthrough.

 

It wouldn't work well without the stags doing tanking duty, interrupt alone is simply not enough.  It can be enough on one large thing, but for most encounters you still need something to take some hits/afflictions.  

Edited May 13, 2015 by cctobias

[cctobias]

I got this "interrupt" party to level10 and in act 3.  I put that in quotes as while that was the original idea, in practice its more of a "let the stags take aggro" party.  I have completely cleared Od Nua 1-13.  As in everything is dead.  Although I have multiple figurines I have never actually used any yet.  Every character has max perception and dex and a might of at least 15 and most have 18 might.  Everyone wears clothes so no DR other than special items.

 

None of this may apply to PoTD, but I am not that interested in PoTD per se, since I am not a big fan of inflated stats as "difficulty", especially since some aspects of the mechanics are exponential and other are linear, this means that PoTD is probably a lopsided and poor experience, even if it handles some overpower builds less trivially.  Does anyone know concentration numbers in POTD?  As a point of reference if you hover over an interrupt in the combat log it will tell you the values of the roll so you can see things concentration that way.

 

So here are my lessons learned so far:

 

- Swift Aim + chanter ranged speed + arbalest is very strong and the fast killing/DR "penetration" (i.e. big damage numbers) is just plain better than trying to interrupt with wand/sceptre/hunting bow.  I am pretty sure this party is extremely strong early game with just this combo.  I used hunting bows an early game was still pretty solid.  With arbs you can one shot multiple phantoms fast.  The 50% reload on swift aim seems to be extremely effective.  Holdwall is available extremely early if you have the money and is good to endgame when enchanted.

 

- Multiple Animal Companions can tank very well with support.  They do real damage as well.  Part of the reason this works is the AC get the targets spread out.  This is one thing that is likely to be profoundly affected by PoTD.

 

- There is, essentially, no way to interrupt everything you want to interrupt (for many encounters, for 3 or less its possible  I think) in a sufficient amount to allow "squishy" things to do well without something grabbing most of the aggro.  Due to this sacrificing damage for interrupt is generally a lower performance option.  This is most applicable for ranged.  If you are fighting a spawn of Corrupted Druid where there are 3 druids and two pwgra, you will simply never interrupt them enough to stop at least a few very annoying and problematic spells.  Can you make them cast half as many spells?  Yes, absolutely.  But if you switch to arbalests instead of hunting bows, you can take out two druids in the first few seconds of the fight.  In general I have my rangers with heavy to medium damage ranged and my priest/chanter are using wand/scepter (good enchants same speed/interrupt as hunting bow).  So I am combining things to some degree.  Interrupt one caster and spike another.  In general I send out my stags fairly far ahead in the hopes any spell target them and do not bleed over to the party.  Once mostly matured out this strategy was sufficent to completely clear Searing Falls and kill Cail the Silent with my Party taking minimal health damage (everyone still green and no resting after all of SF and Cail encounter).  Edit: I think some people may take issued with this and say 4 barbarians could do it, I think this is not feasible due to multiple factors: 1) they won't be ableto reliably get to everything 2) they are vulnerable to disabling/charming (I don't care if a stag gets confused and dank spores always confuse a stag if its at the front) and 3) you need both coverage (large AoE) and amount (many consecutive interrupts) to really spread out enough to pressure an entire encounter. 

 

- With this many actors (10) it is not pracical to try to melee with everyone in many fights.  It is an important strategy sometimes, but sometimes you just jam up.

 

- Most thing have concentration between about 65-85.  5 of my guys have an interrupt rating >45 some with low 50s.  This means they interupt 2/3rds of the time or on low conc about 80% of the time.  With zero interrupt rating against weak concentration of 65 you would interrupt about 1/3rd of the time.  So against a weak target the difference between strong and weak interrupt is about 4/5 vs 1/3

 

- Many large effects interrupt rather well when you have an int rating of 50.  For example spell strike:jolting touch will usually interrupt everything it hits.  I think so does 3rd level Dragon roars hazard phrase.  Edit: I haven't confirmed this but based on stag carnage I suspect barb carnage has lower interrupt rating.

 

- Once my priest hit mid-level and especially once Chant has dragon roars phrase and combined with large ranged spike (two arbalest rangers reguarly hit for 50 damage and reload stupidly fast, turning a crank that fast is kind of funny looking, with Gunner talent it would be downright hilarious.) AoE is not a real problem.  Certainly its not the most AoE, but a priest can shell out a whole heck of a lot of burn damage and since I rarely actually cast spells on this build for damage, off loading multiple Pillars of Fire and Shining beacons is fine.  Additionaly the things you really want to AoE, like multiple Cean Glwa spawns in Od Nua are weak to fire, aother things are neutral to it.  With maasive arb spike and say 3-4 priest burn AoEs you can take out 4 cean glwas pretty fast.  This is another reason you generally wind up using ranged a lot, the Od Nua level with many Cean Glwa mixes them with Adra Animat which don't do that much damage but have huge defense/DR.  You won't really be able to interrupt 4 Cean Glwas enough to make them not able to get off their AoE paralyze from range, and as melee getting to all 4 (and they teleport too) is problematic at best when there are 4-6 adra animats too.  Preist has a select of 3 nice burn AoEs, Searing Seal (with blind), Pillar of Fire and Shining Beacon (short range).  Laying down all three is enough to seriousl mess up Cean Glwa and blind them.  You can then spike whichever one is trying to cast the paralyze, they should die and will almost certainly be interrupted (although you may graze them alot).  Generally here I do both, fast shooters interrupt one while arbs+GoodFriend kills another.  The stags can tank Adra Animats pretty much fine.

 

- This build is mostly ranged even though I have it specced as melee.  This isn't a bad thing really since my response to, say, a shade teleporting into my back line is to get in the things face and mess its stuff up.  Due to the amount of interrupt all my guys can put out, they are not "squishy" even though they have literally zero DR and poor-medium defenses.  In many cases staying ranged is more efficient in that only the stags take damage and it conserves health, but also you kill faster as you don't need to run around the battlefield and in many cases, due to chokepoints, its not really feasible to have stags engaged and still be able to melee without a lot of overhead.  However there are various fights where I go full melee and in this fights I feel good that they are melee specced, a couple ranged talents (especially since they are wood elves) are not that key, but IW+DW is key.  For example in Od Nua there is a room that spawns like 6 shades and a Cean glwa as a sort of ambush.  In this fight I specifically went all melee on everyone.  I would do the same for a "boss" with few adds (not really many fights like that though).

 

- A well built/equipped interrupt melee ranger is a complete beast on a single target.  I have one ranger using Vile Loner's Lance(1.0 sec interrupt) + Cliad(coordination/marking), she has 67 deflection and 52 interrupt rating and 74 accuracy(w/o buffs), if you get the stag to grab aggro she has 84 accuracy.  Swift Aim and 22 dex +20% DW means fast attack.  Against an ogre the stag can hit for 20+ damage, the ranger will hit at 20+ damage and crit a good amount and puts out enough interrupt that the stag will probably come out half dead at worst.  For single targets I suspect it may be the best "offtank" in the game, when you consider it probably does double the damage of a paladin and that a real tank should be getting spell attention etc. Note that I have never run into anything where the stags did not do decent damage(hitting for 10-20 crits at 30 or so, better if you dot things;the two Big dragons are probably obvious exceptions) so I think its reasonable to say that the AC is roughly equivalent to a x1.2 damage boost + the 20% speed increase + pure damage stats maxed.  This makes the build about double the damage of a hybrid paladin build which need to make significant stat sacrifices.  However the paladin offtank is superior when things get sloppy a ranger like this gets paralyed easily by the AoE paralyze of a Cean Glwa.

 

In Elmshore at the cave where Nalrend is there is a spawn of 2 ogres, 2 ogre druids and an ogre matron.  I was messing around so I did a rather messy approach on them.  I wound up with the following 3 stags on the matron in melee, my Vile Loner's Lance DW ranger + her stag against the 2 ogres + 2 druids(in a in a line 2 vs 4 druid in middle, normal ogres on outside).  My other guys were shooting.  2 shooting one druid 2 shooting another druid.  The melee ranger was attacking one druid, the stag the other each with a normal ogre attack them.  I think each druid got one or two spells off.  Eventually  Iswitched one shooting ranger (my warbow/flail ranger) to melee the matron.  I moved priest forward and casted consecrated and a couple other heals ground to support the melees.  Priest switched to melee the matron after 4 spells

 

The melee ranger and her pet against 4 ogres both finished the fight with half endurance left.  One of the stags on matron was knocked out.   I used 1 AoE spell (pillar of fire on the druids) and no figurines.  

 

I didn't mean for the melee ranger to go against 4 ogres and I was surprised they didn't die.

 

 

Things I want to find out still:

 

- Can I "shutdown" the Sky dragon

 

- How do interrupts work on top of each other?  This is my current working theory.  When you interrupt, a progress bar that repesents the remaing delay is shown.  If you interrupt for 0.35 sec then that bar is 0.35, if it went to 50% there is 0.17 left on the delay.  If you interrupt with a weak interrupt again you will reset that bar to 0.35 sec.  Thus your interrupt was actually only a 0.17 sec delay.  However if someone else interupted the opponent for a 0.75 sec delay weaker delays will fill up that bar additively up to the 0.75 delay.  I am not sure if this is true, but if it is true then a mix of delay strength is probably best.  A Strong delay to establish a "longer bar" and weaker faster delays to add to it relliably.  Pure weak delays add very poorly on their own and they are also decline so fast that one bad roll can let something through, however fast/weak on a "long bar" adds very well and can keep that "long bar" from reaching the end for quite some time. Other than the Vile Loner's Lance most Strong interrupts are too slow on their own as well.  This theory may be wrong, it is mostly speculation based on watching bars.  But I am mostly certain that you can never "add" interrupts to a delay past a threshold, multiple 1 sec delays do not come out to 3 secs.  They just reset each other, the only way they come out to three is if they are timed perfect.  My main evidence for this theory is that if you put a lot of interupt on something you can see partially empty bars get partially filled by weak interrupts and when this happens and the other interrupt was stronger I have not noticed a change in the rate of the progress bar.  The progress bar is noticeably faster on a pure weak interrupt.  If interrupts overwrote each other then you would see a "long bar" get replaced and then decline very fast if it was a weak interrupt.  Due to the nature of this observation I could easily be wrong about the rates and perhaps it is merely overwritten.

 

- Due to the way interrupts add (or fail to add) there is quite a bit of an open question as to what is best (besides hearing the lamentation of the women of those being interrupted).  Almost certainly one interrupt character is inferior (unless there is a happy medium, like one average speed one fast speed weapon ).  Strangely a very good interrupt combo could in theory be something like a Morningstar user backed by a huntng bow ranger, even though they may put out similar number of attacks/interrupt to a DW+fast weapon+swift aim ranger.  Due to the way things add up the first combo may add duration better and wind up the same/better.  However I can say that one fast attacking interrupt ranger is sufficient to take a lot of pressure off whoever is being attacked by the guy he his hitting.  The main question is one of efficiency per interrupt and reliability.   As a pure speculation I am willing to believe that a fast/fast DW combo may lose as much as 50% of the their interupt durations due to the duration not fully adding.  So this may be a rather important thing to figure out.  Edit: basically doing the analysis by (number of interrupts)*(weighting by interrupt delay) is almost certainly a misleading analysis IMO.

Edited May 14, 2015 by cctobias

[cctobias]

Killed Sky Dragon and Undead Raedric with above full interrupt party (no figurines used and only pro fear scroll as consumable):

 

Sky Dragon - 105 concentration

 

Did not use scalebreaker.

 

I only prepped with devtion for the faithfil (+20 acc) and prayer against fear.  It did that inital hop away while I bum rushed it, so it got off its breath attack off.  I started punding on it, I interrupted most attacks it got the tail lash off which wrecked one guy and seriously hurt the two others and stunned some, but it was mostly dead at this point anyway.  Died fast and pretty easy really, Devotion of the faitful has 21 sec left over a duration of 43 so about 22 seconds to kill it.  Not a shutdown really, my ragners were attack with about 90-105 accuracy(depending on buffs), and many still got terrified due to the piss poor implementation of counters in the game.  105 vs 50 is about 50/50 chance of interrupt, and with the accuracy issues its probably closer to 40%.  But that is still pretty good with so many attacking so fast.

 

I had a companion hit(non-crit) the sky dragon for 21 peirece damage with sneak attack hit (accuracy 92 versus def 91).  My kith were all dual wield except chanter with estoc and they generally hit for 4-9 damage and critted for about 15.

 

One thing I noted was that the speed of the bar decrease seemed to vary alot this make me think that perhpas interrupt times compete with each in a race condition.  If a weak interrupt attack and strong interrupt attack are fired at close to the same time, if the weak hits firts then you get a fast bar, if the strong hits first you get slow bar.   Ican't confirm this

 

Edit: I tried doing pure ranged with stags as melee, worked about the same slightly slower kill time maybe safer(about 30 sec).  The interrupt is clearly worse (not using hunting bows), but stunning shots from multiple targets makes up the difference, nothing was knocked out including animal compansions.

 

Undead Raedric - 135 concentration

 

This is a messy fight and the way the chrms from the Fampyrs work is complete BS and really bad design by Obsidian.  The charms are cast immediately and you can't pre prep prayer against betrayal, strike one.  Prayer against betrayal is pointless anyway, they have an accuracy of 78 on hard and it only needs to graze, plus they will all immediately target your priest so there is almost no chance in hell they do not get charmed.  Really bad implementation.

 

Anyway I "fixed" obsidians poor mechanics by simply sending a ranger forward for the dialog then sending a stag to die while my ranger ran back around the corner.  Fight was messy the fampyrs like to bum rush casters and won't stay on stags, they axed my priest afte she fot a couple AoEs off I made everyone go full melee and they cleaned stuff up.

 

Raedric himself I barely interrupted him at all.  I didn't prep with accuracy bonuses or against terrified.  So between grazes and his really high concentration I did very little interrupt.  But even with 100% hit rate you would only interupt him on a roll of like 80 or so with max perception and interrupting blows talent.  So like 1/5 chance to interrupt on a hit, impossible on a graze. 

Edited May 18, 2015 by cctobias

[mazeltov]

Good updates. Particularly useful to hear how this variant of Interrupt build fares toward the late game.

 

Other Interrupt builds that incorporate Concentration reducers (e.g. -30 from Wizard spell, -10 or -20 from Druid spells) would be able to control extreme outliers like UD Raedric better. Late game Priests fully realize their synergy with Interrupt builds, with spells that provide either +30 Interrupt rating for a single character or +18 Interrupt rating for the group.

[cctobias]

Good updates. Particularly useful to hear how this variant of Interrupt build fares toward the late game.

 

Other Interrupt builds that incorporate Concentration reducers (e.g. -30 from Wizard spell, -10 or -20 from Druid spells) would be able to control extreme outliers like UD Raedric better. Late game Priests fully realize their synergy with Interrupt builds, with spells that provide either +30 Interrupt rating for a single character or +18 Interrupt rating for the group.

 

Well that party can reduce interrupt a decent amount with chanter stuff, frighten/terrify and perception boosts.

 

But you only have so much time to buff and throw that stuff out.  I didn't use the chanter -10 concentration although I could of (really should have on the melee try) I used the fire/slash aoe chant.  And which is better having my priest try to put out a debuff or have them actually attacking and puting out moe interrupt?  Lowering conecntration by a few is not necessarily better than have a fast melee attacker putting out more.  I dunno, the problem with interrupt especially melee interrupt is you need to get to the guy as fast as possible and put as much pressure as you can (obviously this changes if you combine in a pure tank).

 

And in the end my experience is that the way things seem to work you can't really reliably prevent something from doing some really problematic things, like the dragon taillash or the cean glwa aoe paralyze.  Even with really good interrupt while you do "slow" them alot one unlucky thing and they get it out then everyone is stunned/paralyzed and the interrupt stops.

 

In the end stunning shots is actually probably very superior to interrupts.  But that is also a level 11 ability.  Stunning shots on say 3 rangers with swift aim+ ranged chant + good accuracy on a hunting bow/wand/sceptre will stun even something like Sky Dragon a whole heck of a lot and stunning stuff actually cancels their "cast" I think.

 

I also think this party is perhaps overstocked on interrupt on single targets in that I suspect interrupt can only do so much, its fine as a "slow" and it can shutdown but the shutdown is not reliable or preictable no matter how much interrupt you throw at somethings.  Even one of my guys does really quite a lot of slow actually.

 

I think people can see a lot of returns from maybe just two rangers+chanter.  Bottom line one DW max speed ranger slows things by a lot and having many guys interrupt can spread out a lot of pressure onto an encounters, but concentrated interrupt works rather funky due to the mechanics of interrupts.

 

In the endgame I think pumping accuracy and using stunning shots would be vastly more effective against something like UD Raedric than any kind of interrupt (of course you can have both).

 

My rangers have:

 

max Might

con 5

max dex

max per

int 10

resolve 5

 

So you can have interrupt and stunning shots if you want.  Stunning shots is a 2 sec stun, so a graze(on the stun roll) is one second which is like a strong interrupt.  Yes its against Fort which is high for many things but you can get  rangers accuracy to 110 or higher if you concentrate on it and there is a hunting bow with speed and a sceptre with speed as well.  With the right debuffs and buffs a set of 3 fast shooting rangers should be able to stun even the Adra dragon's 120 fort quite a lot.

 

I don't think any amount of interrupt can compete with that due to the way interupt works, if interrupt times actually added that would be different but they don't certain so debilitating AoEs can get through your interrupt even when you put out tons of it.

 

Another thing I will note for melee vs ranged is the pathing in POE is terrible so getting all your melee to attack the sky dragon can be problematic even on something as large as the dragon.  For melee interrupt you really need everyone attacking as much as possbiel and its easily possible to get half your guys sitting around picking their noses even if you told them to attack not that this isn't something some micromanagment can't help with but its a real problem with melee.

 

I think my final verdict is that in the end you should go for ranged with max accuracy on a ranger due to stunning shots and use interrupt as a secondary thing (possibly including melee but not making large sacrifices for it)

 

Also priest of skaen with interupt is pretty badass.

Edited May 18, 2015 by cctobias

[Manty5]

Looking at the various posts in this thread, it looks like PoE has managed to make a shutdown strategy with interrupt not very viable as a main focus, so it might be better to incorporate interrupt only as part of a larger strategy that will succeed even without interrupt.

 

For example Miasma of dull-mindedness is a terrific spell that debuffs deflection along with some concentration (by subtracting 10 resolve).  Combining that with a barbarian using one of the enhanced interrupt duration weapons is worthwhile even for just the deflection debuff, and the enhanced-interrupt weapons tend to be good weapons on their own.

[mazeltov]

Looking at the various posts in this thread, it looks like PoE has managed to make a shutdown strategy with interrupt not very viable as a main focus, so it might be better to incorporate interrupt only as part of a larger strategy that will succeed even without interrupt.

 

That's every build I've seen proposed. Basically DPS builds but with a significant amount of "free" (have to buy Perception) ministuns tacked onto the attack actions. An alternative method to generate soft CC. Encounters can't be cleared with soft CC alone, or hard CC alone for that matter.

[JFSOCC]

Does intelligence affect the interrupt duration? I can't tell.

[cctobias]

Does intelligence affect the interrupt duration? I can't tell.

 

No.  The interrupt duration is solely based upon the weapons interupt "strength" rating, i.e. a morning star is 1 second.  I do not believe crits increase the duration but its hard tell.  Crit certainly affect whether the interrupt happens.

[JFSOCC]

yes it gives a +25 to the interrupt roll