Now here's the thing about THF. Your attack speed is going to be low and that's what makes your DPS worse than TWFers barring possible extreme cases like Barbarians with Strength scores of 80 (requires no less than a dozen very rare items, most of which are raid loot). One of the most recent updates greatly reduced the attack speed of everyone but TWF got nerfed less, and TWF is actually a little better now at endgame. But the main point to take home there is THF got nerfed more. It does require less stats and feats, but the damage is barely better than sword and board. Also, glancing blows just means lots of aggro on you since anything not hit yet that gets hit for even 1 damage will jump on whoever did that.Lago PARANOIA wrote:All right, let's forget TWF for a moment.
What about two-handed fighting? I heard that with with stuff like glancing blow and all that THF is comparable.
It would require less of a stat and feat investment. So we'd have something like... this:
STR: 16
DEX: 8
CON: 14
INT: 8
WIS: 16
CHA: 14
(with the +4 bonus points)
All of the level-up points go into wisdom.
Fighter 1 / Cleric 19
Feats:
1: Two-Handed Fighting, Power Attack, Toughness
3: Extend Spell
6: Quicken Spell
9: Improved Two-Handed Fighting
12: Improved Critical
15: Greater Two-Handed Fighting
18: Mental Toughness
I don't know if the khopesh can be wielded two-handed. If it can, then let's stick that in there somewhere.
Your best choice would be a greataxe, which is still not very good and requires ditching some feat somewhere. But again, it's still not very good, and your actual spells are going to suck hard if you do that.
Speaking of which, let's talk about the spells. Put simply, spells need items to be relevant. Damage spells need items that enhance the damage of those spells. Crowd control and save or dies need items that enhance the spell penetration rolls of those spells. These items will account for over a quarter of your damage (note: damage means anything that affects HP, including healing) and +3 vs SR so they're quite important. They also mostly only come on weapons which means you'll be seeing a lot of casters holding two weapons but never swinging them. Obviously if you're using a melee weapon you can't do that. There are ways to get those abilities as non weapons but the items are a lot rarer and usually higher level for the same benefit as well. If you switch weapons you introduce more possibilities for error and more delays.
This same thing introduces a different problem. Lower level spells are often BETTER than comparable higher level spells. Yeah really. Arcane casters don't have a lot to look forward to past about level 15. Divines are ok though because there are more worthwhile spells there.
See, there are no items that boost 9th level spells in any way whatsoever. Even though the latest mod raised the cap from 16 to 20, they forgot to actually expand the fucking item tables to go with it. And to get items boosting 8th level spells you need raid loot and often then it still has limitations like 'need 3 items and then only works for cold spells' or 'only works 3 minutes at a time, 3 times per rest'.
You can get items boosting 7th level spells off random loot for specific types of spells in most cases and items boosting all 6th level spells and lower.
This means your Delayed Blast Fireball is going to do more damage than your Meteor Swarm while also costing less mana and your Finger of Death with Heighten Spell is more likely to land on anything with high SR (Read: most of the endgame) than a Wail of the Banshee. The latter at least manages to be useful anyways because it hits enough enemies that it's bound to work on more than one of them if being attacked by a crowd but it is still fucking insulting that most of the time the thing you got 7 levels ago is still better most of the time.
Divine casters encounter the same problem but have more spells worth casting anyways so they don't encounter that problem.
Anyways, JE was right until he got to the second to last paragraph. No one spends ranks on the repair skill. All that does is make you regain a few more HP when you shrine. It's nothing a level appropriate repair spell won't cover and then some. They can also be healed by cleric spells. They only do half as much (65% as much if you spend 1 or 2 AP on Healer's Friend 1... the higher ones aren't worth it) but divine spells do work. Unless you're an idiot and take Improved Fortification. You know, because you wanted to gimp yourself 1-20 for something that only gave a benefit 1-6.
Also, uber seems determined to lead a bunch of people astray without having any fucking clue what he is talking about whatsoever. I mean, he hasn't even fucking replaced his MW sword that does 1 point of fire damage yet you get from the fucking newbie island and he wants to talk about item availability. Bitch please. After all, the sword is functionally identical to a +1 sword. Which means a +2 sword fucking replaces it. That's a level TWO item. Of course you won't find it from chests until level 5 or 6, but you can go on the AH and buy it for far below market price and use it at level 2. Yet he still seems to think you'll find better gear from random drops than from the AH.
He's also still missing the fact his elf is well into one hit kill territory at any time due to much lower HP. Dead characters do 0 damage.
I'd be willing to wager ubernoob has still not left the newbie island. The newbie island is a fucking joke. Someone completely new to the game can solo the whole thing on hard with any character class flawlessly. Someone who has played at least one character before can solo it on elite. The game gets a little harder in the harbor, a lot harder in the marketplace, and starts getting mean once you get to the houses and the areas outside Stormreach.
Lago: Pretty much. Best AC characters are using robes. But getting an AC that means anything means farming for lots of raid gear because you need lots of different dodge bonus items and insight bonus items to do it.
Power Attack is a good idea later. It's not a good idea for a while as there are actually a fair number of enemies you'll have trouble hitting without Power Attack. Later on enemy ACs have barely improved and your to hit bonus is triple what it was. Yeah sure, go ahead and let em have it. But as a Cleric, forget it. The excess attack bonus thing doesn't apply to you.
One point I really need to drive home here is the non caster classes are actually worth a damn, and what's more things like CoDzilla and gishes and whatever are highly suboptimal to the point of nonfunctional without lots of rare gear.
Further if you want a 'competent DPR person who happens to have a variety of nice secondary schticks' well that's called 'any melee guy with UMD and lots of scrolls and wands to use'. It's not going to kick in very well at level 1 but then neither are those other builds. It's also going to be expensive, but not nearly as much so as grabbing a bunch of rare loot will be.
Example: 100 Heal scrolls will last you a while. They will also cost about 200,000 gold. That's about an hour or two of farming a relatively low end high level area. By the time you can reliably make DC 39 UMD checks you can easily afford that. Similar parallels work for lower levels and lower end items.
