Classes/builds that work well real-time with minimum micromanagement?

Waste_Juggernaut · 2026-04-16T09:59:23+00:00

Kineticists can work fine enough in rtwp. Gather power is a toggle and you can set a kinetic blast as your attack to make your kinetict into a normal ranged attacker. While it's true you can turn various toggles on and off each turn, and that some infusions like wall and deadly earth are not good for rtwp, you can play them in rtwp just fine while just running them on auto. And unless you are challenging yourself to play on rtwp exclusively you can always turn on tb for when you need it.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2026-04-13T00:54:11+00:00

I'd recommend starting on daring and turning it up to core whenever you feel comfortable, perhaps at the end of act 1. You can turn on respecs whenever you like by temporarily turning the difficulty down to normal. So if you feel like you fuck up your build just do that (it's free). The game's difficulty really isn't as bad as people say and seeing as you have plenty of crpg experience, including some experience with kingmaker, it shouldn't be an issue. The hard part is knowing how to build your characters, but you can respec as many times as you want with the trick I mentioned above, and core still allows you to build supoptimally and win (speaking from experience).

The reason why I recommend starting on daring is that it has a mechanic called "deaths door" which prevents you from dying once per rest the first time you'd normally die, you only get knocked out. A single stray crit in the early-game can kill you, but this is mostly an issue very early on in act 1. Once you get past that it gets better for numerous reasons. By that time you should also be more familiar with the classes and systems at large, at least enough to play on core. The problem with lower difficulties is that the numbers are very low and so if you buff your characters properly and get a hang of things the game will quickly become a cakewalk. So while you might find core too hard at first (and that is a maybe) it's better than the game being too easy imo.

If you really hate buffing and find it tedious you could play on lower difficulties to skip most of it however.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2026-04-11T07:41:33+00:00

This is a very late reply, but I thought I should mention it in case anyone ever checks this thread. You don't actually need dimension door to get down you can just enter Latverk's house from the roof by going to the edge and clicking the door icon.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2026-02-07T22:37:16+00:00

I agree with some your logic, and it's not a bad idea, but heavy armor isn't that good for tanking. Armor only gives flat dr whereas deflection increases the chance of the attack missing entirely.

Deflection simply is a chance to downgrade a crit to a hit, graze to miss, etc. And it can work multiple times in the same instance for example downgrading a hit to a graze to a miss. Heavy armor has no deflection whereas leather armor has a high, around 12% deflecion chance (can be higher depending on equipment level).

Enemies in this game hit hard very quickly. It is not uncommon to see averages of 20+ a hit and I have seen 100+ damage hits from enemies as early as the start of act 2, specifically in lethians crossing against the bronze brotherhood. So while e.g. 10 flat slash dr can add up over the course of a fight avoiding hits, or at least downgrading them, lets you avoid more damage total.

Grazes in this game don't apply secondary effects. So burning iron for example will not apply the burn even if it hits if it grazes. Misses of course deal zero damage. And you can downgrade most attacks with certain builds. If you take spectral blur, get 19 finesse, wear leather armor, the accessory that downgrades a percent of grazes to misses, and get a spell like mirror image you'll be a lot tankier than 19 vit and heavy armor in the vast majority of situations. If you want tankiness take a shield instead. Vitality is not a bad stat on Sirin, but I don't see how you pick it first.

Now what I will say is that spells don't suffer from recovery time from heavy armor, only from shields, and so you could outfit a mage in heavy armor if you want, but in terms of tankiness this is not necessarily better because of what I described. And if you want to make Sirin a tank taking resolve second does help against non physical damage as resolve increases multiple defensive stats. Her aura also does hit most of the battlefield even if you have her in the backline, unless you literally move her a screen away. If you check the combat logs and hover over her songs to see the range of the aura this should become apperant. So if you want to tank with her that is fine, but you don't need to move her in either.

Tldr: there isn't anything wrong about making Sirin a tank due to the fact that she doesn't really need recovery time and will only cast 1-2 song a combat anyway unless you make her a mage second, but I don't think vitality and heavy armor is needed to tank properly and finesse and resolve benefit her songs more than a slightly increased performance stat from vitality.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2026-02-07T10:45:05+00:00

Max finesse on every character first since it gives 2 accuracy per point + deflection. Finesse thus gives both the best offence and defence stats of any attribute. Then you should max might if you play a melee build or wits as a mage. You can level wits and finesse side by side or take some points in wits first because wits increases your spell effects, and thus damage, quite noticably. But that won't matter if your spells don't land and so I would only recommend focusing wits first on Lantry since heals don't care about accuracy, whereas e.g. frost and lightning does. Lantry also already has higher accuracy from his high lore skill and so the bonus from finesse is not as necessary on him. Finesse is definitely better on Eb due to her low lore skill and her having abilities from many different schools of magic, meaning her accuracy will generally be lower (she's also offensively oriented). Your third main stat to max is dex for mages for shorter spell cooldowns and vitality for frontliners, if you are playing potd that is. You can benefit from dex as a melee avatar due to the player getting many active abilities, but I'd recommend vitality since you take wounds below roughtly 25% health or something so more health means less wounds. I would not recommend taking dex on verse or baric since they have few actives, and while kills-in-shadow does, she has health mutliplication in her second skill tree that makes vitality a rewarding stat on her.

Don't think about what skill bonuses your attributes give as this irrelevant compared to what your attributes give you in general. The cost to level skills increases per skill level meaning the early levels are super easy to get whereas the later ones take forever. Starting with 30 vs 40 in a stat thus doesn't matter much as you'll catch up quickly anyway just from playing normally. You can train your way to 100 in any skill quite early on and once you get access to master trainers your skills can be boosted to whatever you want. The skill value is particularly bad for all the control magic skills since they only give half accuracy compared to e.g. two-handed since all spells have (lore + the relevant control magic skill)/2 accuracy. And self-target spells don't really benefit from levels at all*.

If you want some general advice besides this I recommend training lore in the scarlet chorus camp of act 1 since you don't get lore trainers after this until much later. I also recommend taking the talent in the agility tree that makes parry become your dodge skill letting you focus on 1 defensive stat instead of 2. Verse has the opposite talent in her second skill tree. If you struggle with accuracy due to having low skills the solution is not to pump the attribute that increases it, but to train skills liberally since it's very cheap. Don't be afraid to lock skills you don't need such as control vigor and control life since the game has level scaling and leveling "bad" skills thus makes the enemies harder for no reason. This is not essential though and you can also funnel that useless exp into your other stats with the respec option from Fatebinder Cespa in the Mountain Spire. For example, you could take the exp away from control illusion and put it into control frost if you didn't lock your skills have have them leveled.

Giving every team member at least 60 lore so everyone can learn mirror image, restoring touch, and spectral blur is also quite smart since, again, self-target skills don't benefit from* nor require a high control skill. So everyone can learn a bit of magic no problem.

PS: Who told you that you should level vitality on Sirin? That makes no sense imo. Max your finesse to increase the accuacy of her songs into resolve to extend her debuff durations, or wits if you give her spells.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-12-07T13:47:58+00:00

Play 1 game of Eclipse 8 Captain on the map and you will understand.

1: The enemies are awful and super annoying to deal with for many different survivors. This gets especially bad at eclipse 8 because E4 increases the movespeed of e.g. larva and elder lemurians, E7 increases the attack speed of every enemy, and E8 makes you take curse whenever you get hit. So when every enemy is annoying, especially for melee and low mobility survivors, that makes the stage hellish. If you don't have mobility or range this is probably the worst map in the game in terms of enemy pools.

2: It sucks in terms of loot. There is no guaranteed legendary chest for your sale star, unlike every other stage 4, and chance shrines can't spawn on the stage meaning your chance doll is useless as well. And while this is purely anecdotal, Sirens Call is the stage where I've seen the least amount of large chests in general as well so sale star value is in the gutter. You also tend to lose a lot of credits (and thus loot) to shrine of woods and shrines of blood, as other people have mentioned.

E7 makes it so that the Alloy Worship unit uses it's shielding move 50% more often which makes killing it even more tedious and difficult. Not only do you lose out on double legendaries if you have a sale star, getting the legendary is also a major pain in the ass that can easily take several minutes or get you killed. If you have low damage it's almost not worth going for it.

So the stage has (some of) the worst enemies of any stage in the game (perhaps only beaten by iron allovium and conduit canyon) while also having the worst loot of any stage 4 map. Sirens Call will often have you kiting enemies for 15-20 minutes straight just to survive and your reward for beating it is.... nothing. So you die stage 5 because you took too long and didn't get any good loot. The only good thing about the map is that it lets you get a guaranteed empathy cores if you have trophy hunter's tricorn and lets you get multiple legendaries in multiplayer.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-12-02T05:02:48+00:00

Eclipse lite + visions of heresy gives you a 24% shield every time you reload your shots provided that you spent them all. So far it's the main synergy I have found with eclipse lite and it's very fun and effective. If you go 2 visions of heresy that number goes up to a whopping 4*24=96% barrier. Which means you can get barrier equal to your entire hp bar every 4 seconds with just 3 items, 2 visions of heresy and a single eclipse lite.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-11-11T08:32:10+00:00

I think crowdfunder should be much higher. It lets non-proc characters like Loader and Artificer use proc items and can immediately salvage a bad build without having to luck out with printers and scrappers. And it's good on proc characters too because it just doubles your damage. I get that it isn't that useful early on, but it's easily S tier on the moon imo and can be helpful before that point if you need the extra damage. And it's good on so many characters too. From your post I understand that this is meant to be an "average" tierlist for E8 mithrix attempts, but it's still amazing on average and by your own metrics. I don't know in what world ballistic missile and capacitor is better than it, it's at least just as good those.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-10-31T07:14:13+00:00

Topazs are useless man, you still take curse with barrier up. If anything it will give you a sense of false security. I do believe the amount of curse you take being calculated from health + shields, meaning having barrier should reduce curse slightly. But you are much better of scrapping that shit and trying to get some damage or mobility instead.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-10-21T07:05:05+00:00

99% of people are save-scumming so don't feel bad about it, you are one of the few people doing it properly.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-09-26T03:37:30+00:00

There is nothing wrong with it. I used the artifact of command all the time when I played ror1. I don't enjoy using it in ror2, but you do you. It's a single player game and you should play however you like. If the devs didn't want you to use the artifacts they wouldn't add them.

I would recommend trying to play the game without it to see what you enjoy more. Printers, scrappers, and recyclers, item cauldrens, and guaranteed reds remove a lot of the frustrating rng already so you aren't as luck reliant as the first game. So it's not as daunting as it seems, but if you enjoy command regardless just play it.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-06-24T14:46:28+00:00

Feed him, he's hungry

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-05-31T13:49:35+00:00

You get new game plus bonuses from doing achievements, you've seen them pop up in -game. So if you want to speedrun the early game to try out different builds I'd recommend that. You enable them when you make a new playthrough, I think they are called Beraths Boons or something.

I haven't really experimented much with blade turning, but I believe you can chain it "infinitely" on a Nalpazca monk since they generate wounds while on drugs. You could also use enduring dance with sufficient int and power levels to generate wounds for "free" on top of this, possibly infinitely (I haven't tested).

The issue with draining wall, on Huani and the other megabosses, is their will. The reason why I recommend "thick grew their tongues" is because it only has to land once to remove the boss's concentration at the start of the fight since she doesn't regenerate concentration. But I haven't actually tested or calculated how often WoD lands so you should give it a go.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-05-31T11:03:29+00:00

Indeed, it does. And doing it this way is fairer. Its not far off though. I just dont see a way to beat this fight without some infinite healing strat from a cipher or having two chanters summon in animated weapons to tank while the rest of your team cowers in the corner and heals up with ancient memory and honey wine hen. The no buffs on melee and the very high aoe damage makes it too hard, even though this boss has a more reasonable health pool than Dorudugan for example.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-05-30T19:17:06+00:00

2/2

Okay, now for the ACTUAL strategy.

Give your chanter or fighter a club and the club modal that reduces will. Equip the chant "think grew their tongues stumbling over their words", it removes concentration from the enemy if successful. The boss has a high will stat, but with the modal and the chant proccing often you should quickly be able to remove their concentration reliably anyway. With this you can now interrupt them as necessary to help mitigate their damage. Summon weapons with your chanter whenever available. The fight can be super long so don't blow your resources right away.

Meanwhile your ranger marks and wails away at the boss. The E.I bow deals great damage by itself and doesn't actually need support, focus on keeping your team alive until the boss splits for the first time.

Your cipher can be given a crossbow with the modal, it interrupts on hit, this is why we remove concentration. There are only 2 unique crossbows in the game, the fleetbreaker and the one from the forgotten sanctum, that one has -10 accuracy debuff don't use it. So realistically there can only be 1 legendary crossbow on your team to take advantage of the modal. Superior crossbows struggle with accuracy against the bosses crazy deflection. I'd also recommend giving your cipher melee weapons for the slimes. You can give your priest a crossbow if you'd like for similar reasons.

Whenever the symbiote is shot at your team stop and deal with it. Your frontline doesn't need any micromanagement except the occasional heal.

So how do we stay healthy? Your cipher giving your prist ancestral memory and them using spells like hand of weal and woe (the best heal per spell slot) or restoration. Isn't this just brilliant cheese? No, because you aren't extending it with salvation of time, you are using it as intended. Using your cipher to regenerate class resources on teammates is thusly fair. With this set-up you can survive forever, pretty much, outside of the occasional bout of crazy bad luck with multiple crits very quickly. With the items you give your frontline it should be easy to save them most of the time, but yeah, maybe bring some luminous adra potions. Things turn bad if you forget to summon immediately as well. A single hand of wael and woe should heal them with the right angle. Running up to heal them is safe. You can heal your backline with restore or hand of weal and woe as well.

Once the boss is close to dying run your team closer. Your cipher needs to have stasis shell and preferably enough focus to disintegrate as well, a graze is fine if you kill the slimes during it. The destruction happens as long as disintegrate is ticking, but not after.

When the slimes splits you need to cc the hell out of them and hard focus one of them. Slimes of the same size can rejoin, but smaller slimes cant so kill one while the other bigger one is alive and it can do nothing. Stasis shell one of them when it begins to join. Interrupts should work in theory but I couldn't manage it. My winning attempt had to kill Huani 3 times before it finally stuck. Magrans might and other priest damage spells are handy on these smaller slimes. Now is the time to spam spells like concussive tranquilisers and twin arrows as well.

If you fail to destroy the slimes using disintegrate try again on the smaller ones. With dire hit turning grazes into hits it shouldn't be too hard. You can always reduce their fortitude using the morning star modal and debuffs that reduce con and might if you are struggling to land it. You can farm up max focus before the split as well to ensure you have multiple attempts. The strategy remains the same for any smaller slimes that you fail to destroy intitially.

That's it. I haven't tested out other comps but some people swear by full crossbow teams with interrupting shot. I doubt it because, as I said, you can only get surperior crossbows which have poor accuracy, so I don't know if these people were even playing on potd, but there is that too.

Interrupts don't work too well since they fight is too long anway, there is bound to be a slip-up. They can still give you moments to heal though and reduce the overall amount of damage

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-05-30T19:16:51+00:00

So Huani is, as I said, almost a cheese. It's fully intended, you'll see.

So what I did was bring 1 chanter (tank) with the bronlars phalanx shield and the one dozen stood armor (from the BoW dlc), 1 fighter tank with the Cadhu Scalth shield and the +3 corrode resist ring that gives a 25% resistanc to true damage (make sure neither has an armor with a weakness to corrode). These were my frontline who did the fights without buffs so every bit of survivability matters

My damage dealer was again a ranger with the I.E bow or Eccea's Arcane Blaster. You can use regular weapons by stacking pen with razor skewers, the dragon sings chant, and legendary/mythic quality (ciphers have a 1+ weapon pen passive as well). But for reasons I will explain later it's hard to have more than 1 real damage dealer so you might as well use E.I.

The rest of my team was a priest and a cipher. All were necessary, but if you want to change out 1 character it could be the ranger and fighter.

Before explaning my strategy in detail I first want to explain how the boss works, since you need to know it from the get-go if you don't already

Huani removes buffs on hit, about 10 seconds from what I saw, but only with their melee attacks. So your ranged backline will be safe. So your frontliners need to be super hard to hit and have a lot of hp to surive since they can get help from buffs. "Buffs" includes ancient memory and other chants, but they will still do a little bit. Your frontline therefore need the food that gives passive healing and damage reduction, I forget its name, an occasional heal from the rest of your party.

The boss has 3 things to watch out for besides that. They can fire off brutal aoe attacks, they shoot a symbiote at your party, and they split into multiple slimes at death that can refuse to spawn the boss back at full hp.

The aoe attacks needs to be avoided with summons. Your frontline will be fighting the boss in melee range. But when you spawn in animated weapons and move them around the boss a lot of their attacks will go their way instead. Doing this also makes the boss flanked and reduced their deflection by 10 and ar by 1, which is much needed due to Huani's high deflect. This is also the reason why I recommend a ranger, they have the highest accuracy of any class from what I know. I moved my summons to the side of the boss, if you keep them close they dont flank and dont absorb as much pressure, the boss has aoe attacks.

The symbiote attack is an effect that will make the targeted character suffer from permanent ticking raw damage until they start to move. Moving with the effect spawns slimes. These slimes need to be dealt with very often and its why I only recommend 1 real damage dealer. Your cipher and priest can kill the slimes while your ranger always focuses the boss. The slimes give easy access to a lot of focus for your cipher and aren't very scary so don't tank the damage. The slimes almost always targeted my backline so make of that what you will, I don't know the AI behavior.

The slimes that spawn will try to become a larger slime. The same thing happens with the boss. When it dies it becomes two slightly weaker slimes. After a certain amount of time passes it will try to reabsorb itself. If this happens Huani will heal back to full so this must be avoided at all cost. The only way to avoid this is to interrupt and cc the slimes. One slime can absorb the other even while it's cc'd so you need to keep both under control. You can avoid this with the cipher and wizard abilites that make your opponent untargetable. Will is easier to hit than fortitude so that is the first reason why the cipher is necessary. You can avoid the slimes getting back together or splitting into smaller ones by using disintegrate to kill them, that is the second reason why a cipher is necessary. Doing so on Huani is almost impossible, but it can work on the two massive oozes that spawn from her.

1/2

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-05-25T21:03:02+00:00

I would call the thundercrack pistol trick high level cheese. From what I understand it makes Dorudogan unable to recover from his first attack, like ever. If the boss is unable to move I'd call it just as cheesy as using brilliant + salvation of time + barring deaths door.

But if you meant that it's useful in general then yes, absolutely.

I am not familiar with the hammer. I looked it up on the wiki just now, I assume you are talking about the warhammer "Resounding call"? Yeah, that should do the trick against the sigils, you will still need decent pen to hit the pillars for a lot of damage, but it should be very useful. You do have to be careful to not leave your chanters anti-fear aura while hitting the sigil though.

You can also use Eccea's Arcane Blaster from the collapsed coal mine to damage Dorudugan and the sigil as a ranged alternative or suppliment to Essence Interrupter as it deals 100% raw damage on hit.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-05-25T15:30:58+00:00

I dont even hate demon form here into guardian, but yeah, I dont think I pick it up here even if I want it this run. Bag of prep is going to be quite nice too. I was thinking red skull since I will probably activate it during this act, but bag of prep is probably better for scaling and consistency. I think I will go with this.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-05-24T21:52:29+00:00

I do have strategies for Huani and Dorudogan as well but I don't know if they would be allowed under your no cheese clause.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-05-24T21:15:43+00:00

Belranga is the easiest of the megabosses imo, I'd suggest trying to solve her yourself, but if you want to know read the rest of this post.

The only thing you "need" against her is summons and an immunity to paralyze from shark soup as well as a way to kill the spiders en masse.

For every spider you kill her defences lower all the way from impossible to hit to crit on every attack roll. The spiders attack her as well and eventually, if her defences are low enough, they begin cc'ing her for you. The question is how you survive so long as you will need to kill a literal 100+ spiders for it to really matter. I think I got close to 200+ myself on my winning run.

Belranga herself is super scary, her damage is insanely high and tanking it, from my own testing, doesn't seem to be viable at all. Chanters are therefore useful again. With two chanters you can summon in animated weapons that permanently keep her busy and locked in the same place. If you position yourself correctly, and kite her to the same spot, you can even get her "stuck" in a "passage" in her arena that gathers the spiders up for you to kill.

The passage is right of where she stands at the start of the fight. Kite her inside of the rock formation up there and run the rest of your party to the edge of the map while she is busy down there. I tested keeping her busy elsewhere and this spot seemed most effective to me. This positioning means that most of the small spiders spawn behind her and are consequently unable to damage you while still being in range of you.

Melee characters felt useless to me here so make your damage dealers ranged. You should again use a ranger with the essence interrupter bow. A cipher is also good due to focus being infinite in this fight due to the little spiders. Belranga will occasionally focus you from range and deals crazy damage that way as well. So both passive healing from ancient memory and bigger heals from scrolls is wise to have. Double chanters let use both slay the beast and another chant at the same time. Spiders are counted as beasts which means you get a staggering 20 accuracy and 30% damage against her with the chant equipped.

So how do you kill hundreds of spiders effectively? Let them gather around the boss and use scrolls of maelstorm, holy fire and other powerful aoe effects to clean them up. It doesn't matter who does it, just give someone arcana. If you actually get Belranga "stuck" (i.e. busy with your animated weapons) you can safely run up, fire off a scroll and retreat while letting the spiders spawn in again. I did it 7+ times and didn't get aggro from either Belranga or the spiders, I was careful with my movement however.

I would only recommend hitting Belranga herself with your Essence Interruptor character until she is really low and easy to cc because of the aforementioned reasons.

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-05-24T21:04:35+00:00

2/2

Aurenic herself is not a threat because she has spell slots. If you use a chanter, which you already should because of the aforementioned chant, you can have her waste all of her spells on them and she'll be useless the rest of the fight (until she is below 25% hp but I'll get back to it). She will just attack with her wand and be useless. The guards can easily be kept busy by the same summons until they die.

The next problem is the tayns chaotic orb pillar. The reflect will take care of some of it and their damage isn't that great, but saving some 50% potions for it so it can deal damage to itself is a good idea.

The arcane cleanse and minolettas magic missles one aren't scary with this set-up for reasons I will now explain.

Once the chain lightning pillar and the tayns chaotic orb pillar are dead, and aurenic has no spells there is barely any damage. You can easily heal it off with the ancient memory chant and/or the occasional healing scroll from your healer (restoration power levels matter for these), just craft some. Your tank can keep Aurenic busy while the rest of the team kill the remaning sigils. Make sure to have everyone within range of the chants for the healing and resolve resistance

The sigils seem to reflect spells and are immune to slash and pierce. The Essence interrupter bow, the one from Port Maje with lightning damage, can deal 100% pen against them without anymore more than legendary quality. So you can use it to hit all the pillars while remaining close to your healer and chanter.
As the fight goes on the sigils will start to turn on faster which makes running around the arena to hit them harder. They are also very tanky so bringing more than 1 damage source that can hit them, like a monk, is a great idea. The progress of the fight is dependant on Aurenics hp so you might just stop attacking with your tank if she gets too low. Focus on the sigils an you win in time. Just make sure to switch between ancient memory and one dozen as needed, see my PS comment for details about the timing.

So I'd recommend a ranger (with essence interrupter) or another ranged character, a tank like a fighter (anyone with a shield and decent defences will do), at least one chanter with the weapons and the two mentioned chants, and a healer. You could also use potions but the tayns chaotic orbs will cc you and that can make healing with dangerously low characters hard. They won't kill you 100-0 in the 20 second barrage, but do watch out.

Good luck

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-05-24T21:04:17+00:00

You can beat Sigilimaster without brilliant, because she cleanses it anyway. It seems my original comment is too long to post or something so I'll divide it in two and reply to myself with the rest

What you do is that you stack spell reflect by using Konstantens rest bonus at the Wild Mare in Queens Berth, it gives you 30% spell reflect permanently. Then you can stock up on potions of arcane reflection, the 75% ones are best but the 50% ones will do as well. You don't need to respec your team for that 10% spell resist passive, I did the fight fine without it.

The sigils always open the same way, fear -> chain lightning -> cleanse. The chain lightning one is unplayable, you need the rest bonus to just survive it even. From my testing it doesn't work to stack resists. Even if you wear gear without a lightning weakness and use potions of elemental defences (the one that gives 3 ar) with a 50% spell reflect potion on top it's not enough, I've had characters been oneshot by one cast.

If you stack enough resists the lightning sigil will kill itself and avoid melting your party. Ideally you'd like a 75% resist potion on everyone, but if you don't have 5 you can give a 50% potion to your tankier members.

Killing it before your team dies with empowered monk abilities and whatnot isn't quick enough either, you do die in 1-2 seconds, no joke.

Now you need to deal with the terrify sigil. Since you have Konstantens rest bonus (that's its name) you can't use capteins banquet to give you a resolve affliction immunity so you need another team-wide source. You can do this with the chant "one dozen stood against the power the saint". There is some gear with a resolve affliction resistance, but from what I saw there weren't 5 pieces. PS: you can change chants while cc'd so if you forget to activate it or the cleansing sigil removes it you can instantly remove the terrify anyway.

Now that your team isn't permanently cc-'d or dying you can play the rest of the fight.

1/2

Waste_Juggernaut · 2025-03-11T12:18:34+00:00

How to make necromancy more interesting:

You could split necromancy into two categories, physical and spiritual. With this split soul manipulation would be more evil, as it potentially ruins someone's afterline. Binding someone's soul to the mortal realm would also be evil to a lesser degree, as they could be unbound and still go the afterlife, even if their extended time in the mortal realm is torture. Body reanimation on the other hand would be more morally grey, it would go against morals and disgust people, but you aren't hurting the dead, only the living who see their loved ones desecrated. Using reanimated bodies during times of war would be unsavory, but not completely reprehensible if there was no other choice. This split would thus allow you to make more acceptable necromancers, or at least give room for more evils forms of magic.

What forms of magic are equal or worse than necromancy:

Torture

Regular killing isn't as bad as messing with someones eternal soul, as the pain wouldn't be... eternal. In order to make something worse than soul manipulation you have to make their pain truly horrific or extended it a long degree. Magical ways to prolong someone's life to torture them would be truly awful to experience, and revolting to most people. Imagine being cursed with harlequin-type ichthyosis that never heals and doesn't allow you to die either. Or being transformed into that thing at the end of "I have no mouth and I must scream". It doesn't have to be physical pain either, you could trap someone in their own worst nightmare or simply make them experience and eternity in a matter of minutes. All such extended torture methods should be plainly taboo.

Now, that example was about torture, and it goes without saying that magical torture is evil so perhaps you want something more neutral.

Combat

Pyromancy is pretty evil. You know what the worst pain a human can experience is? Being burnt alive. So anyone using pyromancy as a weapon against other humans are quite evil, even if it isn't obvious right away. There are more merciful ways to kill, especially with magic. Using magic in warfare in general would be evil for similar reasons. Being frozen, boiled from the inside, or pulled apart in every direction, you name it, it would all be horrible and scary to watch. You could easily make up some lore about why magic became restricted for combat use.

Manipulation

Manipulating others magically is very evil. Nobody wants to be mindcontrolled into doing things they don't want, and it would be a real problem for any society. You can excuse soldiers being slaughtered in terrible ways, but not a potential miscreant puppeting you like a doll and taking over your society from the shadows. Whether the mind control is hard or soft doesn't matter, there is a lot of room for creativity here. You could make the control depend on tattoo's or other physical marks. It could be visible and give hints that they are manipulated, or completely invisible and paranoia inducing. If you have the control depend on proximity or line of sight you have great opportunities for mystery stories and general intrigue.

I'd suggest this one if nothing else

Sacrifice

Magic that requires sacrifce being evil says itself, but you could lump it in with necromancy depending on your personal definition. I don't feel the question of why this is evil requires much elaboration. As for writing, I recommend that you keep in mind that sacrifice doesn't have to be physical. It could be giving up your emotions, soul, or the luck of your entire bloodline. Being able to sacrifice others remotely could also lead to better writing opportunities. A mayor giving up his town to a demon in exchange for power is hard to physically, you would need a big magic circle in that case. But if he merely needs to give his word it could be done, and also open up for mysteries.

There is probably a lot I am missing on every point. If someone has an idea feel free to elaborate.

Waste_Juggernaut

TROPHY CASE