Semi-drifting until end of May (6/5/19)

Okay, it’s now official. The most metal Tamil in Singapore has spoken. If you’re a victim of any Tom LeVoyeur, it doesn’t matter whether you’re Monica Baey or He Ying Ying and it doesn’t matter whether the offence is committed in NUS or anywhere else. So long it’s in Singapore, Tom LeVoyeur is in trouble, Korean Tom or no Korean Tom. The most metal Tamil in Singapore has spoken.
https://www.businessinsider.sg/voyeurs-may-get-caned-following-changes-to-penal-code-shanmugam/

With that being said, let’s continue onto whatever stuff I’m planning to stuff people with. Allow me add on a bit about what I’ve said previously.
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/05/semi-drifting-until-end-of-may-5519.html

I suddenly remembered Arylos got the Assassin’s Covenant mount insignia bonus. So what this means is that I’ll need to do some major switching. This may (or may not) involve boon respec. Two things I need to do here:
1. Switching the gear enchantments here and there. Not wholesale switching though since that’d be no different from giving myself a bait and switch.
2. The same goes for active companion bonuses. The numbers game now makes more sense and it’s likely that being a ranger means having your gameplay defined by the choices made. So rejoice, all you ranger users. In Undermountain, you’re now given the freedom to formulate your strategy like a Batman. Okay, that’s an exaggeration.

So does that mean Arylos should ditch the cat while retaining its active companion bonus? To be honest, I already upped that critter to legendary rank. So a large part of myself would loathe to switch to either Reus or Klarke. If my memory has yet to fail me, it means switching the active companion bonuses shouldn’t be an issue. At the very least, I should be able to get a combination of Siegemaster, Redcap Powrie, Cat, Alchemist Experimenter, and Battlefield Medic. Using the 10% mathematics, however, it means only 850 power given via the AC bonus. Thankfully, there’s a rank 14 Azure  enchantment for me to switch around. Maybe two Silvery enchantments on the off-hand weapon? If I can sneak in a Blink Dog, that’d be a power bonus of 1450 instead. That’s a more comfortable number to me. Then again, I’m not sure whether active companion bonuses do contribute to Assassin’s Covenant since boons are most likely excluded from the equation.

Okay, Azure enchantment rank 14 gives 1000 in defense for the defensive slot. That means +100 power in Altair’s pouch. 1550 power should mean 3% bonus in damage since I read somewhere that every 500 of any stat=1% bonus. Wait, I think the Cat can be shifted to the bottom right active bonus slot. If so, then I can smuggle in a Blink Dog companion bonus and a (hopefully) neat AC power bonus of 1550. Wonder whether a combination of two Aspects of wolves can work unexpectedly well in this case since the HP bar now fluctuates easily enough in any raid, RLQ or no RLQ.

Now with that being done, it’s onto Cyrea Durothil. It feels a wee bit weird for me to say she looks like an accidental visual similarity to He Ying Ying. Thankfully, it’s due to the hair. In other words, she’s not the only girl with the shoulder length hairstyle.

Because I do have an un-Singaporean tendency to tinker like a Teutonic Low or a Catalan Pep, l decided to respec her from Arbiter to Devout. Now there’s a practical reason to this, however. And that is the annoying possibility of getting no tank and no healer in a RIQ raid unless it’s instances like Valindra’s Tower, Malabog’s Castle, and Kessell’s Retreat. Along with her, I plan to convert Kariss Locras from a Hellbringer warlock to a Soulbinder. If my choice of healers sounds offensive to anyone, that’s because I don’t care about my nation’s PC culture.

I only had a brief run with Cyrea the Devout before my decision to visit Heliopolis City come end of May (or Marina Bay Shinar if this doesn’t work out). Suffice to say, you don’t use a Devout with a Gond car companion. Simply put, don’t contemplate using an augment companion. Arbiter, sure go ahead. But Devout? That’d be worse than going home empty handed two years in a row despite decently high hopes of getting something.

This comes to mind an important question: Can my Devout use a taunting companion? Trust me when I say your Wild Hunt Rider white knight isn’t going to bail you out. I tried, the white knighting strategy didn’t work. If it’s not going to work in Halaster’s titular base, it’s definitely not going to work anywhere else. So how absurd circumstances could get in this case? Running an Arbiter with a white knight works because the taunting actually... well, works. Since the Arbiter is more of a store-and-nuke class, it means plenty of fire and radiant fury without the risk of things going Chultan south. Unfortunately, Devout doesn’t operate like that. The aggro is not going to care how attractive your Devout is, male or female, sun elf or no sun elf. White knighting won’t work on them. Your Devout’s aggro bar would just remain in the red. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a bug unlike so many buggy riding since N mods ago.

This is not to say that augment companion is a better choice because I’m very sure it’s not since testing the mod on live preview server taught me a few tactical lessons in advance. Quite obviously, using a healing companion for a healer character has to be the dumbest strategy imaginable. Which means only one option available: Damage oriented companion. Now it must be pointed out that the companion role category is officially scrapped. So you may need to trial and error so long it’s not someone like an Angel of Protection or Battlefield Medic. I chose a blue rank Fire Archon due to its damage potential. The outcome? Payload.

The hilarity behind this absurdity wasn’t lost on me. There I had a companion whose job was to hold aggro. Then the next thing I noticed, the Fire Archon said, “Hold my beer” in primordial language. Which now comes to an interesting question: Would choosing a ranged dps companion work if you happened to be a Devout? I’m not just talking about the Fire Archon. We’re actually dealing with companions like Neverember Guard Archer and Wayward Wizard. Companions synonymous with the North Korean weapon technology.

This resulted in a pleasant situation: Should I still go with Apparatus of Gond in raiding? Of course, there’s this theoretical risk of aggro attraction (note that I only mentioned theoretical). The first time I tried that, aggro attraction wasn’t an issue. The second time I did my raiding experiment, the Fire Archon became the guinea pig. That guinea pig turned out to be a nuclear option. At this point, let me point out that role specification now plays a major part in raids. If you’re a tank, it means you’re not going to deal the kind of damage expected from a dps unless you’re a paladin running on an Oath Of Protection paragon class and planting holy bombs (e.g. Bane+Sacred Weapon). Even more so if you’re a healer. In this sense, party gameplay is now better balanced since total item level now plays a lesser role in the damage department. To be honest, I got no problem out-dps’ing a tank with a total item level around 2K+ higher than mine.

The fun thing about using a Devout is whether you want to pull off Exaltation. That encounter power won’t hike your damage game in such a way that it’s possible to out-dps an actual dps party member. But it does decent enough damage while upping your outgoing heal. Coupled with a Fire Archon and the offensive momentum can easily be upped since combat advantage damage can scale up pretty fast in this mod. For now I’m still stuck with a locked raiding loadout . Using the solo loadout for RLQ, however, was fun enough to mess around with. For some funny reason, Cyrea could afford to use her Divinity gauge sparingly. But I had to tinker quite a bit to get it right. Initial testing involved high amount of Divinity being used. To me, being this wasteful in a RLQ skirmish means not good enough. Channeling Divinity sounds like a useful thing. Yes, it’s useful. But refilling Divinity in this manner was very slow. The chief reason why was that I was messing around with Healing Word just to test the synergy.

After realising that too much Divinity was being wasted over something I’m not confident about, I decided to change some things. Basically, the encounter powers looked like this:
Intercession, Exaltation, and Cleansing Light. The base healing game wasn’t much to shout about, but using Exaltation as a compounding effect did seem to work decently enough. Note that this is just about raids like Master Of The Hunt and Dread Legion, so things are still subjected to scrutiny. At the same time, the last Dread Legion run actually involved two Oath Of Protection paladins. Funnily enough, that didn’t prevent Cyrea from topping the Field Medic ranking at 2 million plus HP healed. I didn’t know how that happened to be honest because the only major healing done was when a party member was revived and Intercession came out as a result. Then again, the only way to decently explain this would heal over time instead of a one-shot heal. Otherwise, there’s no logical way to explain how healing beyond full HP can be treated as actual HP healed. But there’s a problem: Healing Word does have HoT effect listed in the tooltip.

Which now comes to whether Blade Storm can proc from range. Believe it or not, Undermountain isn’t the only mod making Unlimited Blade Works out of this class feature. If you’re observant enough, you’d realise that Blade Storm could proc from ranged attacks instead of just in melee mode. I truly doubt it’s a bug because the devs did spend some time fixing buggy things where this class feature was concerned. At the same time, it’s likely that part of the coding done for Twin-Blade Storm was reflected on Blade Storm since Twin-Blade Storm can be done from range. So yeah, the tooltip was lying. Not that it matters anyway.