Prayerful Strike vs. Blood Tax (PvE)

[Greywander]

I've been considering making a tweak to my build for the DLC. I'm a STR/FTH regen tank build. I'm focused on maximizing damage reduction, which includes use of the Ritual Shield Talisman, and using regen and healing buffs and effects to continuously top myself off and keep the Ritual Shield active as often as possible.

With that in mind, Great Stars with Prayerful Strike, or a spear/thrusting sword with Blood Tax? Which spear/thrusting sword?

Addendum question: Icon Shield, or infusable shield with Holy Ground?

[Imperator Ricardo]

Prayerful Strike offers a fixed 30% heal-on-hit, wich stacks with the Great Stars innate 1% heal-on-hit. It also provides hyperarmour so you can trade it into some bosses and larger enemies. Hyperarmour also slightly reduces damage taken during trades.

Blood Tax has no hyperarmour, and restores a little more than 10% of your health. Due to the lack of hyperarmour, most enemies will stagger you out of it before finishing the attack, making it rather impractical against bosses and larger enemies that do not stagger from the attack.
Definitely not the way to go on a Strength/Faith build though, it rather belongs into an Arcane build.

As for the Shield question, the Icon Shield will prove more practical.
Holy Ground is useful, but you would have to continue standing in the holy zone, wich is not recommended in boss fights unless you have a Greatshield ready to block all incoming attacks with.
Whereas you can simply carry the Icon Shield on your back and receive all the benefits.

[Señor Brown]

Great Stars with Prayerful Strike, Icon Shield

You can also equip a 0.5 weight Rickety Shield (or Buckler) with Holy Ground in one of your other arnament slots. That way, you can pull it out, cast the regen circle, and requip the Icon Shield.

[LuckyCheshire]

For Great Stars, I would actually suggest you powerstance them and do lots of jump dual attacks. Like was suggested, you can even have an offhand Rickety Shield with Holy Ground on it and swap back and forth. Staying in the HG zone is going to be the tricky part though.

[Greywander]

Hmm so I guess I chose correctly the first time when I went for Great Stars and Icon Shield. I was wondering if Holy Ground would persist if you switched out the shield, since they nerfed the Golden Vow ash to end on a switch out. I guess it's an option, but sounds like it might be more trouble than it's worth.

Prayerful Strike is a bit slow, but with my poise and tankiness, on top of healing myself when the ash hits, it's actually viable to poise through an attack if it means getting the ash to connect. My thinking was that Blood Tax might be a little faster and easier to squeeze in between enemy attacks, and that I could lean into shield pokes with a spear.

TBH I'm not keen on dual Great Stars. But I think that's fine. Powerstancing misses out on the hyperarmor you get with 2H, and it doesn't deal quite as much poise damage as a guard counter. It's not bad, certainly, but it's not strictly better either. It's about what playstyle works best for you. You also can't buff both weapons, and buffing your weapon is one of the benefits of a phys/FTH hybrid build. So I think 2H or sword'n'board fits better with my build and playstyle.

What I can do though is upgrade an extra Great Stars or two (I traded one from another save so I could have one at the start of the run, so I have three now) to have alternate affinities or ashes on them. Then I can just hard swap depending on what I'm fighting. Prelate's Charge looks interesting, as it should hit many times and proc the Great Stars' heal on hit effect rapidly. Not sure what else.

[BBQ]

Originally posted by Greywander:

I was wondering if Holy Ground would persist if you switched out the shield, since they nerfed the Golden Vow ash to end on a switch out. I guess it's an option, but sounds like it might be more trouble than it's worth.

Holy Ground is like an AoE and should not cease to exist when you switch shields.
Also, Golden Vow is an Aura Buff and should also stay when you switch weapons. No matter if spell or ash of war version.
It more likely stopped, when you applied another aura buff.

[Greywander]

Originally posted by BBQ:

Holy Ground is like an AoE and should not cease to exist when you switch shields.
Also, Golden Vow is an Aura Buff and should also stay when you switch weapons. No matter if spell or ash of war version.
It more likely stopped, when you applied another aura buff.

I mean I haven't tested it lately, but I remember hearing that it was common to slap Golden Vow on a dagger or something and use it as basically a free buff. Then it got patched so that you lost the buff if you switched out the weapon. If they were going to do that, though, they should have made the ash as strong as the spell.

[LuckyCheshire]

Originally posted by Greywander:

Originally posted by BBQ:

Holy Ground is like an AoE and should not cease to exist when you switch shields.
Also, Golden Vow is an Aura Buff and should also stay when you switch weapons. No matter if spell or ash of war version.
It more likely stopped, when you applied another aura buff.

I mean I haven't tested it lately, but I remember hearing that it was common to slap Golden Vow on a dagger or something and use it as basically a free buff. Then it got patched so that you lost the buff if you switched out the weapon. If they were going to do that, though, they should have made the ash as strong as the spell.

No, that never got patched out. It's already reasonably balanced since you can only use one aura-type buff at a time, and it's significantly weaker than the incantation version.