Basic Stuff Help (Damage Types, Stats, etc.)

[tgExcalibur]

Greetings everyone,

After completing a full playthrough, I’ve gathered quite a few questions that I’d love to get some clarity on both regarding how certain mechanics actually work and how to properly approach character builds in general. I have plenty more but here are some of my more basic questions to get the discussion started:

1. The Core Skill Barrier
• I understand this skill is meant to protect you, but how does it absorb damage? Currently, it says it adds 345 Barrier that “fills” my health bar.
• There are some spells, like “Stable Barrier” from Earth, that mention they grant Barrier. Are these skills tied to the core skill Barrier? I mean, do they work only when you activate Barrier, or are they independent?

2. There are plenty damage types(?) may I say? How do you understand what they do?
• Rage
• Overload
• Overwhelm

3. There are also some spells mentioning
• Increase Attack Damage
• Increase Physical Damage
What's the difference?

4. Alignment
I can see that the game is heavily focused on ailments. From reading the tutorial, these are mainly damage types that are dealt over time. For example, Burn deals damage over time.
• My understanding is that any Fire Spell has a chance to cause Burn right? There is no need for it to mention it on the skill.
• Does the same apply when hitting with Melee fire weapons?
• How important do you find these?

5. Critical
• Do Critical also happen on Spells?
• If yes, how is that determined?

6. Stats and Masteries
I started with Earth Mastery and used Fissure and Earthquake as my primary spells. I soon realized that these spells deal Strike damage, which is increased by Might, while I’ve been putting points into Knowledge, assuming I was building a caster character.

Since these spells have no cooldown, I’m basically spamming them, and there’s no real need to use basic attacks. Because of that, I have no idea what kind of weapons I should be equipping on this character.

In general, I’d like some advice on how to approach mastery combinations. How do you plan a build properly? When combining masteries, do you usually focus on the same element that both masteries provide, or do you choose to go hybrid?

Thanks for the help.

[Gregor]

to number 1: You'll see a lighting layer above your healthpool when barrier is active.

To 6 I'd choose a weapon, that will offer the best benefits to the character, as you don't rely on autoattacking, anything that boosts your stats is welcome.

to the others I've got nothing valuable to add.

[Scipo0419]

1. Simply put, Barrier generates from the Energy Barrier and Free Barrier stats (typically from Magos/Plated Robes and Shields respectively). You can get more information on Barrier from the expanded tooltips.

2. Rage, Overload, and Overwhelm are not damage types, but buffs (debuff in Overload's case). Rage increases your Attack damage per stack, and can be modified with "Spell Rage" to increase Spell Damage and Cast Speed per stack, but you generate it with skills or on kill with a Warfare Passive. Overwhelm is generated by skills with the "Basic" tag (Primary Attack, Ice Shards, and Lightning Strike) or through the "Enhanced Charge"(?) Modifier in Earthquake and Weld Weapon skills, but requires a skill with the "Overwhelm" tag to be on your bar. When using an "Overwhelm" skill, you need 3 stacks and the skill will consume all 3 for a huge buff/added effects. Lastly, Overload is a debuff that deals fire and lightning damage to you and is generated by adding the Overload tag to spells. The tags heavily buff the skills with the "downside" of generating Overload. Some skills gain damage based on your Overload stacks, and stacks can be cleansed by spending mana on non-Fire/Lightning spells and you restore Energy when stacks are cleansed. It's a balancing act mechanic, high-risk/high-reward.

3. +Attack damage increases the damage of all "Attacks" regardless of their damage type. +Fire Damage increases the damage of all Fire Damage regardless of if it comes from an "Attack" or a "Spell."

4. Every skill, including Primary Attack, has an "Ailment Chance" added effects may not list an Ailment Chance and therefore cannot apply Ailments. For example, Lasting Sweep in Sweeping Strike adds an AoE that deals % weapon damage for up to 3 seconds, but it will never apply ailments.

5. Crits work the same way as ailments. Every skill has a Critical Chance

6. Use weapons that have +strike damage affixes (not +Weapon Strike Damage). And for what it's worth, Agility also increases Strike Damage.

6 pt 2: I pick one or two damage types that the masteries offer, then pick one or two primary attributes that buff those damage types to pair with Vigor. For example: My Earth/Rogue was Fire/Poison until I swapped to Fire/Pierce and split between Might/Agility/Vigor. My Earth/Forge is Strike/Pierce/Fire (Physical/Fire) and split between Might/Vigor. My Reaver is split between Pierce/Poison so it's Agility/Vigor.

[tgExcalibur]

Thank you both.
These will help me getting started.

[rancidpickles13]

1) Barrier is basically an extra health bar layered on top of your normal health bar. Damage done to the barrier is calculated the same way as any other damage. However, it drains automatically over time based on your barrier decay rate, so it is unlikely to actually absorb that much damage.

1b) Depends on the skill. In the case of stable barrier, the barrier threshold is not limited to the core skill (earthquake, for example, can generate barrier, which will then drain to your threshold point). I believe that the +% barrier only applies to the core skill, but I could be mistaken about that.

Some of the modifiers within the core barrier skill do apply to barriers generated in other ways, such as with earthquake. Most notably barrier heal applies to any barrier, as does the decay rate. I have not tested the "on use" modifiers with non-core barriers, but I assume those only apply to the core skill.

5) Every skill, including basic attack, has a base crit chance (e.g. 5%). Any % boosts to crit chance boost that base chance (+100% of 5% = 10%). For this reason, Increases to base crit chance are much more effective than % boosts, in my experience.

6)As scipio said, weapons that boost strike damage will benefit earthquake and fissure the most. You can also look for defensive boosts. Swords frequently offer resistances and bonus glancing hits chance, and can either be dual wielded or use a shield in the offhand to provide further defensive boosts.

If you are using lava fissure, then +%fire damage modifiers on weapons will boost fissure. +% fire damage can also benefit some of the passive skills like ring of fire, if you are using that. +crit chance and ailment chance can also benefit those skills, although the benefit will likely be minimal unless you are built around crit or ailments.

[tgExcalibur]

So the amount of Barrier is simply an extra life pool. If barrier grants 300 points and you have 1000, it's essentially as having 1300 for the period the Barrier is active. I noticed it starts "decaying" as the game mentions, right?

So Attack Damage improves ALL sources of attacks even spells of any element?

Thanks guys!

[Scipo0419]

Originally posted by tgExcalibur:

So the amount of Barrier is simply an extra life pool. If barrier grants 300 points and you have 1000, it's essentially as having 1300 for the period the Barrier is active. I noticed it starts "decaying" as the game mentions, right?

So Attack Damage improves ALL sources of attacks even spells of any element?

Thanks guys!

For barrier, yes.

For attack damage, no.

+Attack Damage will only affect skills with the "Attack" tag. Spells are a different subset of skills.

Edit:
Fissures, by default, is a "Spell" that deals "Strike Damage". So, +Spell Damage, +Physical Damage, and +Strike Damage, will increase its damage. If you add the Lava Fissures modifier, the fire damage will be boosted by +Fire Damage. If you covert Fissures to Pierce with the Spikes Modifier, +Strike Damage will no longer affect Fissures, but +Pierce Damage will. Lastly, if you convert Fissures into a Weapon Attack (without the Spikes modifier), and you're using a Sword with Strike and Pierce damages on it, then +Spell Damage no longer affects it, but +Pierce Damage, +Weapon Attack Damage and +Attack Damage will all affect Fissures now.

[tgExcalibur]

Alright, this needs some studying,
Thanks again.

[tgExcalibur]

I decided to make a new character and build him a bit more properly since you helped me understood a few more things now. The character I decided to make is Warrior/Rogue and focus completely on physical damage since it's quite easier to follow and understand the mechanics. Coming back with a few more questions guys.

• Melee attacks deal AoE. Is that a mechanic of the game or it depends on something?
• I invested in primary attack so it really seems pointless to invest points in active abilities right? It's either you use your primary attack or an Active skill as your main damage.
• How does lifesteal work? I thought I will get life back as I attack but nothing seems to happen.
• Are resistances maxed at 60?

Now the part that confuses me the most.
• A sword i found has 80-100 damage and just below it with small letters it says
40-50 Pierce damage
40-50 Poison Damage
Since I invested in pure physical damage, a dagger of 60-80 damage is going to be much better because it's going to gain advantage of all the modifiers that increase physical damage right? It's just that I didn't notice that you have to look below the main damage that a weapon provides to see how it synergies with your build.

BUT there are plenty modifiers that "convert damage to 100% Pierce" for example. So if I enable that, the poison damage of the sword is going to converted to pierce, eventually being a better weapon than the dagger? With that being said, those "Convert damage to x 100%" seem like VERY important.

But then again what happens if you have enabled like 2 or 3 such modifiers? What kind of damage are you going to dea? My primary attack currently has those modifiers.
• Convert 100% damage to pierce
• Convert 100% damage to fire
• Convert 100% damage to poison

Thank you!

[rancidpickles13]

1) Melee AOE is a part of the game. 2 handed weapons have a larger AOE. Spear might not...I'm not sure about that.

2) Some active skills can still be useful. Aside from the aura's...

- Trick shot is great for boss fights, or so I hear. Primary attack can struggle with boss fights.

- Mark for death and Doom horn would both be useful as support skills to boost damage.

- If you're melee, Leap is awesome. Can convert it into a weapon attack, does decent damage and can help you close the gap or get out of trouble. Useful with ranged too, although less so typically. Can convert it to a weapon attack with a staff too though, which is pretty cool.

- Valor would likely be useful, although I haven't tried it.

- Vanish is great. Boosts movement speed and damage significantly.

- Flicker should be nice, but it doesn't work very well with WASD in my experience, unless they changed something.

- Probably other things you could make work as support skills, if you felt so inclined.

3) 10% of any vitality damage done is regenerated as HP. This only applies to vitality damage, and not other damage done by an attack. If you 100% convert your damage, you won't regain health.

4) Yes, resistances cap at 60. For now. There are some passives and such that can boost it over 60.

-----

Depends on a lot of things. The sword has higher unbuffed damage. There's a 20-30 damage difference in physical damage between the 2 weapons, but the sword does an additional 40-50 damage. If your physical damage boosts are high enough, the dagger will do more damage, and faster attack speed than the sword.

However, The sword has a better range and larger AOE. Also, any points put into Vitality drain modifier for the primary attack will be more effective, since that's 10% of base damage.

There are other considerations as well. Some swords come with +glancing hits, so can benefit you defensively. Or daggers with +base crit chance can help boost damage significantly if you're built for crit. Also, don't forget about strike damage. Plenty of other physical melee weapons available.

Your primary attack right now has three 100% conversions attached to it, which splits evenly between them. So 33.3% each for pierce, fire, and poison. Any active skills you have converted to a weapon attack, such as leap, will not benefit from these modifiers.

There are also conversions in the auras, which they recently reduced from 100% to 30. Those are global conversions, meaning all weapon attacks will be converted rather than just your primary attack. Those have the benefit (or drawback, depending) of not being 100% conversions, meaning you would keep some of your vitality damage and the base damage of your weapon. Also, the conversions in the aura's apply a visual change to your weapons, which is kinda nifty.

Hope that helps, and merry xmas

[tgExcalibur]

Omg, there are so many things to look out to create a perfect build. Thank you so much, everything you posted helps me understand something a bit more each time.

Regarding the active skills I was mainly referring to damaging skills. I am applying Buffs and Debuffs but yeah in certain situations a specific skill might still be better than Primary attack but I just spent most of my active skills in the Core Mastery and wanted to see if that's overall the better approach.

I invested in Vanish first and then in Valor only to find out that both skills can't be applied at the same time. If you activate Vanish, Valor gets a cooldown as well.

One more thing I forgot to ask, dual wielding now attacks really fast leading to extreme mana depletion. Any "easy" tip to maintain mana? Energy Potion fills half of it and until it replenishes I am already down.

Thanks a lot for your massive help!

[Scipo0419]

I only play Primary Attack builds:

For Warfare/Rogue: Barrage, Heavy Attack, Sweeping Edge (more support/aoe in a Primary Attack build), Bladespin, and Lethal Strike are going to be your damaging skills. Even with Primary Attack at 17, you'll want a burst skill. Barrage works really well with Mark for Death and Doom Horn's Crushing Spirit modifiers.

Valor and Vanish are both "Blessings" (shown in their tags), Blessings share a cooldown to prevent stacking them

You shouldn't have Energy issues with Primary Attack. What's your energy cost and attack speed of Primary Attack (shown on the Tooltip) and your Energy Regeneration (shown on the Attributes screen under Core)

[tgExcalibur]

My first character was a Warrior and I was spamming Sweeping Edge in the entire Campaign along with Heavy Attack against bosses. At this point I had absolutely no clue what I was doing.

With the approach I made on my new Warrior/Rogue, Dual Wield with Rage seems quite solid and since it also deals AoE I really find it hard to add any damaging skill as I feel it will only slow me down. In any case, I obviously need to try a damaging skill and see how it will go. I was thinking of Lethal Strike but for the time being I reached the maximum level and have no spare points to experiment.

I currently have 351 energy with 145 reserved from Battle Awareness and Preparation so 206 usable. Mana regenaration is 32/s.
Primary attack must consume 6 mana per attack with the modifiers I have.
With Dual Daggers and 19 rage it attacks very fast, tooltip mentions Attack speed: 235% without any extra buff (Vanish, Dodge, Doom Horn) otherwise it goes over 300%.

I added a modifier to Battle Awareness +2 energy regeneration. Didn't help much.

[Scipo0419]

Originally posted by tgExcalibur:

My first character was a Warrior and I was spamming Sweeping Edge in the entire Campaign along with Heavy Attack against bosses. At this point I had absolutely no clue what I was doing.

With the approach I made on my new Warrior/Rogue, Dual Wield with Rage seems quite solid and since it also deals AoE I really find it hard to add any damaging skill as I feel it will only slow me down. In any case, I obviously need to try a damaging skill and see how it will go. I was thinking of Lethal Strike but for the time being I reached the maximum level and have no spare points to experiment.

I currently have 351 energy with 145 reserved from Battle Awareness and Preparation so 206 usable. Mana regenaration is 32/s.
Primary attack must consume 6 mana per attack with the modifiers I have.
With Dual Daggers and 19 rage it attacks very fast, tooltip mentions Attack speed: 235% without any extra buff (Vanish, Dodge, Doom Horn) otherwise it goes over 300%.

I added a modifier to Battle Awareness +2 energy regeneration. Didn't help much.

You'd have to attack 6 times per second to lose energy with Primary Attack.

[rancidpickles13]

Originally posted by tgExcalibur:

My first character was a Warrior and I was spamming Sweeping Edge in the entire Campaign along with Heavy Attack against bosses. At this point I had absolutely no clue what I was doing.

With the approach I made on my new Warrior/Rogue, Dual Wield with Rage seems quite solid and since it also deals AoE I really find it hard to add any damaging skill as I feel it will only slow me down. In any case, I obviously need to try a damaging skill and see how it will go. I was thinking of Lethal Strike but for the time being I reached the maximum level and have no spare points to experiment.

I currently have 351 energy with 145 reserved from Battle Awareness and Preparation so 206 usable. Mana regenaration is 32/s.
Primary attack must consume 6 mana per attack with the modifiers I have.
With Dual Daggers and 19 rage it attacks very fast, tooltip mentions Attack speed: 235% without any extra buff (Vanish, Dodge, Doom Horn) otherwise it goes over 300%.

I added a modifier to Battle Awareness +2 energy regeneration. Didn't help much.

Primary attack costs 5 mana base. Idk what other modifiers you have, but 100% conversions to pierce (+2), poison (+1), and fire (+1) makes that at least 9 per attack. More if you have more than 1 point invested into any of those. Some other modifiers also add energy cost.

I'm going to assume that you added up the costs of your modifiers to get 6. So your primary attack likely costs 11/attack. At 32 energy regen/s, that's 3 attacks per second to start losing mana. Which might be doable with fast enough weapons and enough speed boosts.

The first block of information in the tooltip has 3 pieces of information in it. Cost, cooldown, and attack time. Also in the details tab in the inventory, first page under weapon, it mentions attack speed. This information is also under the "offensive stats" tab in the attributes page. If you go into your attributes page while you have full rage, it should show how many attacks per second there.

To compare to my reaver, who uses primary attack with a staff. He has 11 mana cost per attack, and 0.81s attack time (1.24 attacks/s). Base attack speed 1/s, and +24% attack speed from passives.

If you're using a dagger, your base attack speed is 1.56/s, with a minimum +235% boost?? (that's pretty high lol). That amounts to ~5.2 attacks/s, assuming my math is correct and i'm working with the correct numbers. If your cost/attack is 11, then that is easily enough to drain your mana (roughly 57 mana/s, vs. 32 regen).

Anyway, now that I have rambled for 20 minutes...

- You could track down gear and charms/relics to boost mana regen. There's plenty of energy potions that add 1-3 regen, and you could find some more stuff elsewhere. You would be rather hard pressed to get mana regen over 57/s though.

- You could invest some points into conservation in your aura's, so that you have more mana to work with. Also some gear/charms that boost max mana or reduce reserved mana. You would still drain mana, but it would take longer to run out.

- You could switch to a slower weapon (or combine a slower one with a faster one if duel wielding), or swap out some of your gear that boosts attack speed. You could also change your passives around (or their modifiers) to something else, like damage or crit chance.

- Your best option might be to reduce the cost of your primary attack. If, for example, you took off fragmentation and put it into say, vitality drain instead which doesn't cost more energy, cost would be reduced to 9/attack @ 5.2 attacks/s = ~47/s, which is significantly more manageable than 57. Course, then you lose the conversion and the AOE from that modifier. *shrug*

- Or some combination of the above. War and rogue don't really offer any other solutions to the problem.

[Scipo0419]

If he checked the tooltip, it should already calculate the total energy cost. But you're right that he's apparently running 3 conversions despite saying he wanted to be pure physical?