Summon Buff Changes

[Exordius]

Summons are fine as they are, if you want lower the ac and hp down a bit more but otherwise leave it. Can actually use the other summons now as they no longer suck compared to conduit, before the change there was no reason to use any other summon but conduit as the normal summons were pathetically weak in comparison to the game's mobs. Now people are using different types of summons and we have more variety rather then everyone all going conduit because there are no other options.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

Well, I was going to wait for summons to be nerfed before continuing, I don't want to have to start again. But the people hate my work, so I must continue.

Today's test subject: The dire spider. Traditionally squishier than some of the other options, let's see what it's like now. Today I'll be visiting the iron mines, the goblin fort, and the gambler's bluff.


Despite surface trying its hardest to kill me with lag, the spider required minimal healing through the entire thing. I was able to breeze through the bottom floor of the iron mine without difficulty. Usually in the iron mine I make use of land features to try and pull enemies away from larger group in some of the more challenging rooms. I didn't have to this time, I just sent the summon in and let it do its thing.
The spider's damage output is lower than the dire wolf's, so I had a lot of fun flinging spells at everything.

The server reset and that fixed the lag problem, so I decided to run the dungeon again with the dire wolf. The dire wolf takes more hits and actually needs healing, but it's also a giant powerhouse and absolutely rips through everything faster than the spider. With that said, the spider gets mind immunity, which means I got to use color spray with it. A benefit to the wolf is the hitbox is better, it's easier to target whatever it's attacking in front of it. The spider legs stick out too far. The half-dragon boss absolutely destroyed the wolf though, it cast dismissal and I had to run away and summon a spider. For fun I might actually use sequencers on the wolf and see what the hardest content I can do with it is. It is a mad lad that craves blood and violence.

Bandits: The spider took a decent amount more damage and actually needs to be tended to. But bandits are also weak to daze, so I had a lot of fun casting on everything.

Goblin fort: Easier than bandits, harder than iron mines. Nothing much to say about it.

Thoughts:
While the spider is fairly tanky, I like that its damage output is lower and that I got to cast so much magic. This is what I'd like to see from summon and caster rebalancing, that they can rush in and tank while I cast spells at things. If/when summons get nerfed, I'd be fine if offensive numbers were reduced to what they used to be, but HP and AC bonuses are kept at the current values or something similar. At least with lower levels. Summon creature has a problem where it doesn't scale with the caster in epic levels, so I'll be spending a lot more time with summon creature 9 and seeing what I can and can't do with it.

Otherwise, could the spider be made immune to web? That would make arcane flux + web a fun combo.

[magistrasa]

But the people hate my work, so I must continue.

I need this quote as a tattoo.

[zeroth]

Please Do include the shadow summons in the buff changes. They are really pathetic right now.

Make them work please.. They need some love!

[xf1313]

Yes the shadows, from spell and shadowdancer summon. They are brittle

[Subtext]

But Shadowdancer can still solo content six levels above its own. If anything it still needs to be nerfed. Remove hips and shadow guarding.

(I can't believe I am saying that with a straight face.)

[Sincra]

The trick to Shadow dancer shadows is to self buff, create the Shadow then buff it again.

[UilliamNebel]

Thought I'd hate the buff changes, and using sequencers.

Have to admit, after trying it out has it was intended, I am a fan of it.

So, to lay it out, was using as pure build level 30 Spider Totem Ranger, with the lesser Druidic.

Spider companion, not as powerful as before with the loss of additional Con and Wis buffs. But still more than enough to get the job done.

Surprising thing was the viability of the Dire Spider / Summon Creature IV with this sequencer. Was actually able to step up into the role of where I normally would grab a pair of Phase Spider henchman with Animal Empathy and keep along with potions (happily still an option for when forced, or just want to do, an all-out 'zerging').

I was able to more less go where and how I wanted with just the two, and indeed did pick up other spells to experiment for greater utility. Overall tactics changed slightly, to make the Animal Companion and Summon work as one side of a pincer to the C that was using dual wield daggers (Before be the C with henchmen driving mobs toward the Animal Companion). The ambushes with traps, spells, and spell like items, followed by that maneuver, actually hit way harder and way quicker, playing to the character's strengths and concept of being, like a spider ambush predator. So overall a very satisfying game play experience, as the summon stopped being too heavily aggroed to even be in a fight now (hence the need for two henchmen with higher HP before).

Only weak spot, but not terribly so, was the same as always been with healing kit and potion usage. Largely still able to lower the economy side of it with dual wield cast of Arelith's variety of Blade Thirst. I've actually always liked this balance, the melee is paced, for a purpose, to control the fight as the C and spiders manuever, and to give the C time to 'feed' off the enemies and heal. Pretty much what makes the pincer move work, the driving of aggro to the C as the spiders with poison weaken enemies being pushed into it after the debuff of a trap and such in the initial ambush.

Now, due to how different an animal it is, none of this works for PvP in any way as far as I know. So cannot say how this would play out there. These PvE tactics are extremely tactical, for chosen fight situations, or slipping away in stealth. Not a criticism of it, but PvP in NWN, from my experience is largely a Yahtzee's (Zero Punctuation, Eve Online critique episode) 'Who has bigger boots' scenario like most MMOs still.

[98lbs of sad carryweight]

The trick to Shadow dancer shadows is to self buff, create the Shadow then buff it again.

It only takes your attributes.
And your hard armor limit for some reason but you can just buff with vestment/naked to avoid getting a random cap.
Thus only its AC/AB get buffed, while the AB is only relevant if you are a Str-SD (why?)

So you get a AC27 shadow, with sequencer you can push that a little bit. Its still carried by its conceal, things with blindfight or just a high enough AB and APR will melt through it easily. I am not sure what content people can clear so easily but I havent actually seen it happen where it stood above regular summons in any iteration or some of the other classes, like SS.

I say this because there are rumours about 50+AC shadows with relevant damage which I havent seen anyone ever proof with a screenshot or so.

Also kinda sad that mundies who cant really self buff also need to also lug around sequencers now I guess. Atleast they're not heavy and 2x2 anymore. (I hope)

[Subtext]

The trick to Shadow dancer shadows is to self buff, create the Shadow then buff it again.

It only takes your attributes.
And your hard armor limit for some reason but you can just buff with vestment/naked to avoid getting a random cap.
Thus only its AC/AB get buffed, while the AB is only relevant if you are a Str-SD (why?)

Perhaps more obviously put.

My main uses Rogue Leathers, meaning a cap to my dex bonus at +6. I recover most of it due to Rogue/SD levels - not all but enough that it's viable.
If I summon the shadow however, the shadow ALSO is capped at +6 dex bonus. So I can choose to either summon naked (and it feels really odd to have my toon's nude copy running around) or carry another six slot piece around when I already have to carry around a ton of stuff. Otherwise I sacrifice quite a lot of AC on the shadow.

I am not sure that is intended behaviour.

In the best of worlds, you can get your shadow a 30ish AC. Which is nowhere near enough for any epic level content. Yes, you should clear that in a party which is something I do not even disagree with. But THEN I am using a class that is outperformed by essentially everything else in terms of party viability. Not to speak of PvP even.

And yes, AB on the shadow is plain pointless for dex builds. It was somewhat usable when you could apply bless weapon but that doesn't work anymore.

If the Shadow actually copied buffs I applied on myself, I'd do a flippin maypole dance.

[xf1313]

Everything the above said

The reason I levelled shadowdancer is that it provides better survival abilities...this is greatly reduced with the attempt to nerf summon. But then other summon creatures gets re-buffed and summon shadow is left behind. Funny result, shadowdancer is nerfed lol.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

I've been giving a lot of thought for what to write now. It's getting to a point where feedback isn't so easy to provide anymore. While summons are undoubtably strong, and overtuned in some cases, I'm not sure how bad of a thing this is. So I'm going to talk about a few thoughts I'm having as I do this.

1) Casters won't be as pressed to take conjuration spell focuses, which helps with build diversity. As great as summoning other players is, the major reason to take it is to make PVE content easier. So this means summons need to be viable for a 4 level spread, to account for players not having conjuration focus. Right now I feel they accomplish this, but I don't know if it's a good thing. It might be sacrilege but what if conjuration focus stopped benefitting summons, and summon creature 9 scaled better with epic casters? It'd be a lot easier to talk about how to balance them if I wasn't keeping a 4 level gap in mind.

2) Not all casters are equal. Let's say summons get nerfed, what sort of position is that going to leave other caster classes in? I'm having great fun with my wizard, because I've got a great toolkit to work with. Caster clerics are going to have a much harder time. The thing that made caster clerics good in the past was they could give their summons all of the juicy cleric buffs. The new caster cleric casting mechanic doesn't kick in until spell circle 4 when the caster gets divine power. I'm not including circle 1's divine favor because that's only a 10% chance at spell refund. And cloistered divine power lasts turns per level, so it's not going to last for terribly long anyways. Leveling a cloistered cleric is going to be far more summon reliant than a wizard is.

Clerics also get fewer feats than wizards, so the summon changes allowing for skipping conjuration become more relevant to them.

Clerics also don't get spell breach (unless they take a domain for it), so I don't know if I'm being fair with my testing. My bear was able to beat up the bullywug queen because I breached her damage shield. I might have to make a caster cleric at some point to see what its low level experience is like. The issue that comes up is domains, and I'm leaning towards not using ANY domain powers during testing, because I hate the idea that clerics are going to be shoehorned into taking optimal domains like they used to be.

3) Making the summon a viable companion means that some people are always going to sit there and let it do all of the work. This is never going to go away, unless summons are deleted and casters are rebalanced to be able to do content entirely on their own. And even then, some people will probably choose to buff and hide behind other players as their "summon". I don't think these people should be balanced around. If summon AC/hp is nerfed, I'm going to have to spend more time spamming heal kits on my summon, which is less time I get to cast magic on enemies. If summon AB is nerfed and they can no longer hit anything, it will fail at being a tank because it can't maintain threat.

Broadly speaking the only thing I think that might need nerfing is damage output on some of them. But I'm not sure if that would enable summons to still perform at the 4 level spread they currently do. Once I've leveled my character more and have experimented with all of the summons (and maybe make a Skal char to do the same), I want to go back and take summons through content I'd use a higher tier summon for and see how they perform.

4) The end goal out of all of this is I don't want game content to be entirely trivialized. I'd like it to be an interactive experience where the caster gets to do something while the summon tanks. But the summon also can't be the perfect tank, the caster should be aware of the summon's HP and be ready to heal it. That is part of making things interactive, having the summon be part of the fight.



So let's talk about summons!
Today we'll be talking about the dire bear, and will be visiting the Cordor Crypts, Bullywugs, and Darrowdeep Barrow. Today should be interesting, the Cordor Crypts is a more difficult dungeon and has a phylactery mechanic boss, and the Bullywug queen was recently buffed to be far more formidable.

Cordor crypts:
The first half of the dungeon isn't a real challenge, the cultists are significantly weaker than the things deeper in. The lower floors is when things start getting interesting, the enemies have +1 weapons and I need to heal my bear from time to time.
The boss room was a mess, a lot of enemies in it attacking my bear while the boss was flinging spells around, but I got through it fairly smoothly.
Fun fact, flare works on phylacteries! Now mages can do something other than sitting there waiting for their summon to destroy it, they can help out! This is really, really nice. Thank you for adding this.

Bullywugs:
The bear was taking damage throughout it, but nothing really lethal. I only had to heal from time to time. Bullywugs are very weak to daze, so I did the dungeon twice to get a better idea of what enemy damage would be like if I wasn't dazing everything all the time. It was about the same.
The boss is the hard part. I breached the damage shield and had an arcane flux prepared and unloaded a few additional damage spells onto her. It went fairly smoothly, but some of that is probably because I knew I needed breach handy ahead of time.

Darrowdeep Barrow:
It's easier than both of those dungeons. My bear ran around and chomped on undead.


Bonus Bloodmoon content:
I ran from Bullywugs to Darrowdeep and passed the Bloodmoon fort and had to deal with all of the orcs attacking the bear. The bear was getting really chewed up by them, I had to heal it a lot. It made me consider that while the bear is strong, it doesn't seem like it could do content above its intended level terribly well. But I also wasn't using sequencers on it. At some point I'm going to return and see how well I can do the Bloodmoon fort while using sequencers. Bloodmoon is a fairly challenging dungeon, much more now that I can't cast all of my usual spells. I'll have to make a non-conjuration caster at some point to see how it plays.


Final thoughts on the bear:
- It always wants to use knockdown which makes the AB artificially lower and artificially lowers the damage ouput, it fails a lot of its attacks in some cases. It stood out most because it made the damage output all over the place. Sometimes it did a lot of damage, sometimes very little. I don't feel like this impacted gameplay too badly because I was spamming spells the entire time, and the summon doing less damage means I get to cast more magic.
- It is very, very tanky for level appropriate content. It was taking very little damage, it felt like it was trivializing content that I know is much harder. The DR on it prevents it from getting hurt. And if people choose to use sequencers on it, it'll be even more tanky.
- I've been saying that my ideal summon would be low damage and high defense, and that's what the bear is. It crosses the line with too much defense though, and showed that there has to be a limit to how much they get.

[xanrael]

1) Casters won't be as pressed to take conjuration spell focuses, which helps with build diversity. As great as summoning other players is, the major reason to take it is to make PVE content easier. So this means summons need to be viable for a 4 level spread, to account for players not having conjuration focus. Right now I feel they accomplish this, but I don't know if it's a good thing. It might be sacrilege but what if conjuration focus stopped benefitting summons, and summon creature 9 scaled better with epic casters? It'd be a lot easier to talk about how to balance them if I wasn't keeping a 4 level gap in mind.

Agreed, I think something similar to this would also fit with the rest of changes in building a somewhat even baseline.

Would need to consider some tweaks to Animal etc domains. Or could just disable the tier scaling (either on or off for everyone and balance from there) and still give GSF the +2 etc bonuses. Also I wouldn't complain if there were a few less -yoink capable casters though I suspect Conjuration will still be popular.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

Another thing I want to say:

I've heard that someone is using summon creature scrolls and sequencers on a melee character to great effect. I'm hoping that summons will not be rebalanced with melees in mind, they do not need summons. This is a caster tool.

[TurningLeaf]

Welp as a cleric I never even bothered to buff my Swarm summons, you get 4 of them and with a couple more casts queued up you just make some more if they die. Total ez mode tbh.

Started on a BG and feels like a huge financial buff for early BG levels, in conjunction with a little herbalism (DC 15 for lesser druidic). Was not otherwise going to be able to afford buffing a summon nearly that much.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

I made a new character to test summons more. Playing a wizard normally shows that summons are strong. But what about making a caster that isn't normal? So I made a Skal start caster cleric without conjuration focus. My domains are trickery and magic, similar to what my actual RP character has.

The question I want to answer here is, are summons still strong? Or am I going to run into difficulty? Because if I run into difficulty, I think conjuration focus should be nerfed rather than summons. Remove summon bonuses from it, balance summons more equally, and give conjuration focus something else.

I'm still going to hold off on using sequencers until I feel I really need them.


So let's do this again. Today's test subject, the dire boar. I'll be visiting Skal's rat den, the founder's cave, and will be doing patrols.

Rat den:
The first thing I'm noticing is inflict minor wounds is awful. I can't hit anything with it. My only infinicast damage spell is completely useless. Unlike my wizard, I'm going to be standing behind my summon the whole time spamming cure minor wounds.
The were-cat is very scary still. It did a lot of damage to my boar, but the boar survived.

Founder's cave:
My boar's taking a lot of damage from the oozes.
The gelatinous cube is very scary, I gave up using cure minor wounds on my summon and began using heal kits.
There were a bunch of enemies that spawned on the transition. I discovered my iron dagger is far more effective than trying to cast inflict minor wounds.

Patrols:
Black bears are dangerous.
A bunch of undead spawned on the transition killing my boar in the forest, there wasn't much I could do about it.
The lake is dangerous. Eagles and dragons would land on me. There was a snow leopard that almost killed the boar.



General assessment so far: My boar is very weak in Skal's starter areas, it's a lot more challenging. I'm only 400 xp off of being able to summon a dire wolf which is good, I don't think the boar could take on the next set of writs in Skal without an arcane or nature sequencer. I don't think the divine one is going to cut it, but I'll give it a go when I run into trouble just to be sure.

I'm also leaning towards conjuration needing a nerf more than summons right now.

[Kalthariam]

So, it's been a bit, I've tried out the changes.

My final results is I still really hate this update, and find it's significantly less engaging, and less interesting than it was before.

I play a level 30 Healer Path Cleric, with the Sun/Healing Domain. My summons enjoyed a plethora of bonuses, and my PC even was able to have my special bless weapon applied to their weapons, so it was fun, it felt Thematic, and I could either play either a group and empower everyone, or I could use my conjurations if no one was around that my character would tolerate being in the presence of to do things.

Even after the buffs to the summons, I just really feel my summons completely lack any oomph they once had, much content that was a regular place for me to enjoy is now completely off limits, unless I get someone else to do all the heavy lifting for me.

I'm also still kinda annoyed I cannot cast regenerate on my conjurations. Despite it being a healing spell, due to it having to apply a "Buff" to the summon to provide the healing, which also means my healer path / healer domain passive ability to build over healing to make up for the fact none of the sequencers give constitution boosts, is completely unsuable.

There is an exceptionally small amount of places my character can remotely get "Offensive" when it come to casting spells at things my conjurations can fight, and it's opened up zero new spellslots for me. It's only cut off access to places I once was able to go. I can't even reasonably decide to change my specialization out of conjuration due to taking Conjuration focus at level 1, and having no reasonable other choices for my spell focuses. So it doesn't even free up feats for me.

So now my character's been effectively relegated to just being around, watching other people do things, while being wholely unable to do said things myself. I cannot even make my own Sequencers, because for some reason alchemy just apparently is incapable of making sequencers.

Overall, this has really simply lessened my enjoyment of Arelith as a whole mechanically, and if it wasn't for the fact I can just sit in town and talk to people, this change probably would have made me stop playing all together.

I'm not some crazy min-maxed character build, I'm a flat level 30 cleric that simply now finds the world less engaging.

The recent summon buffs haven't really changed this. The summons are marginally stronger, but they are dramatically slower, and that slowness ends with them being chipped away anyways, and they generally are not the summons I use anyways?

Overall my opinion of the update hasn't changed, despite giving it time and adjustments being made. I really dislike the sequencer system, I find it frustrating to summon conjurations, cast my sequencer, then suddenly: Oops, I have to stop what I'm doing and go deale with an RP thing, there goes my sequencer charge.. or oops, the servers restarting, there goes my consumable charge. When before it was just a simple "Well at least the server restarts give me my spell slots back, so as long as I'm in a safe place, I've lost nothing."

TL:DR

Gave it some time, I can't make my own sequencers because apparently I just picked the wrong crafting skill long before this change was even remotely put into effect, and I'm basically completely out of luck in that regard, and overall the added steps, and loss of functionality of the character I had has done nothing but dampen my fun, and overall enjoyment of the server.

Mechanically, I'm completely SoL, I've just come to terms with the fact I simply cannot do what many other players easily are able to do on the PvE side of things, and It looks like I'll just simply have to deal with that fact.

I suppose at least I can still blow up undead at the eternal battlefield, might take a ridiculous amount of spellcasting to the point I'm basically out of all of my spells at the end of it, and have nothing else to toss out, but at least I can still do that.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

It's that time again. Today we'll be testing the dire wolf on a non-conjuration caster, doing Skal's tin mine, goblins, and demonologists.

Demonologists:
The dungeon went fairly smoothly, the wolf was able to handle most of the trash mobs in it, taking small damage here and there. The boss was a lot more challenging, it sneak attacks and so having my summon clear the other spawn surrounding it was a lot more risky.

Tin mine:
I can tell from the first floor I'm going to want to use a sequencer here. I used the provided cleric one. It helped out a lot, the AC it provided kept my summon from taking so much damage. After that it went very smoothly.

Goblins:
The wolf was getting hit a lot so I used the divine sequencer on it, the boost to AC gave it what it needed to survive. It went very smoothly after using the sequencer, summon took very little damage.


Summary:
The wolf is notably running into more issues than I was having with my conjuration focus caster. For a non-conjuration focus character, sequencers aren't optional.

Something worth noting though is there were only 2 options here. Either have enough AC that the writ was trivial because nothing hit my summon, or my summon took a lot of damage. But I'm still only on summon creature 3, at low levels fights are a lot more binary like this. As I progress more I'll be able to get a better idea of how things actually play out.


Not summon related, but my inflict minor wounds is landing more frequently. It's doing very low damage, but I'm somehow pulling threat off of my wolf even though I'm doing less damage than it. I am not a fan of touch attack spells. So instead I followed behind the summon spamming cure minor wounds to heal 4 hp at a time like a manual regeneration spell.
I also picked up the healing skill, which I normally skip on clerics. My healing spells aren't good enough yet to handle healing my summon regularly, if I run into something my summon can't fight I'd rather spam heal kits than end up in the fugue.

[xanrael]

Something worth noting though is there were only 2 options here. Either have enough AC that the writ was trivial because nothing hit my summon, or my summon took a lot of damage. But I'm still only on summon creature 3, at low levels fights are a lot more binary like this. As I progress more I'll be able to get a better idea of how things actually play out.

Not really disagreeing, just giving my 2 cents.

For the single digit levels I'd rather them err on the side of slightly too good than not. Assuming you didn't make a character with a bunch of OOC buddies you may need to solo for a few days before you meet level appropriate potential comrades depending upon your timezone.

For the highest level summons I hope that if they have to err, it is on the side of them slightly underperforming as you likely can find friends of carry more of the weight of fighting when you have more than a handful of spells per rest.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

That's about how I feel about lower levels. Characters also don't get a good kit of tricks to work with at low levels either, there's less they can do to mitigate difficulty using tools. I'm noting it because Gron's said he hates watching people breeze through dungeons. This includes low levels, because he buffed the bullywug queen to be harder. So I want to note that there's not much middle ground. If I'm not breezing through it, I'm hurting. So if I say I'm encountering difficulty until I use a sequencer, if things are nerfed more it runs the risk of upsetting that balance.

[AstralUniverse]

currently the creature 3: dire wolf really owns. and I mean REALLY owns.

[jomonog]

So.....what was the point of all these changes again?

[Algol]

Just having old summons with old buffing system, but nerfing DR/ AC on summons would have been a better approach to this whole adventure IMO

[Party in the forest at midnight]

Today we will be using the Dire Spider (summon creature 4) on a non-conjuration focus cleric. We will be attempting the bullywugs, the ghostwood barrow, and the satyrs. It's been a while since I've done Skal, I've been trying to remember what the easier/lower level writs are. I know the troglodytes are nasty and will be putting that one off until I get the dire bear.

The Bullywugs:
I can tell after the first group of enemies I'm going to need to use a sequencer, they did in between 1/3 and 1/2 of my spider's health. I used the divine sequencer.
A lot of groups still would do about 1/5th to 1/3rd of my summon's hp per pull. Sometimes up to a half depending on what enemies I get.
Things die fairly slowly. The spider doesn't have the damage output that previous summon tiers have vs level appropriate content, and I can't really help supplement it.
The bullywug queen is tough. Fortunately I get spell breach now as part of my domain kit, so I could remove the damage shield. I chose that over divine power just to make sure I could deal with it, in hindsight I should have taken craft wand earlier so I could wand breach and free up the spell slot. The bullywug queen died very slowly, I had to do a lot of heal kit spam not only on my summon but myself due to the crowd of enemies around the boss.

The Satyrs:
I applied the divine sequencer before entering. I was able to keep up with damage by casting cure minor wounds most of the way. This area is more of a risk to myself than my summon, a lot of enemies spawned on transition points within the zone, and archers on ledges I couldn't access would targets to me as I tried to move my summon ahead, trying to clear a path into spots where I could break line of sight. I used up all of the invisibility I prepared trying to get archers to stop shooting at me. I did need to use a heal kit on my summon a few times during the area too though, so it's not completely free (in terms of summon damage)

The Barrows:
I used the divine sequencer during the first group of enemies, there were 2 groups near the entry of the dungeon that attacked at the same time. Skeletal priests were spamming inflict spells, so NEP helped negate that. The spider still took heavy damage, I had to heal with heal kits during the fight.
Once past that I didn't need to use heal kits so often, I did a lot of passive healing with cure minor wounds.

I leveled while doing satyrs, which means I can prepare divine power! Since I took the magic domain, that means I can cast magic missile with a 90% refund for 7 minutes. It's time to send missiles everywhere. I saved this for the boss chamber. It helped out a lot, especially against the beefier skeletal colossuses. I was so focused on monitoring spider threat I didn't realize I had killed the boss, I just wanted to throw magic missiles at everything in the room.

Unfortunately I failed a lot of my refund rolls, so even though the refund was 90% I ran out of casts before I ran out of divine power. I had 3 magic missiles prepared too. It helped a lot to supplement the spider's low damage. I leveled after turning this batch of writs in and grabbed craft wand. I filled my 2nd slots with nothing but magic missile, and I'm going to prepare 2 or 3 divine powers so I can keep the magic missiles flowing in the next batch of writs I do. We'll be doing content that I remember as being hard, I'll want as many tricks up my sleeve as possible.


Summary:
The spider is fragile. When it gets hit, it takes a lot of damage. I tried to be on top of passive healing the entire time. It doesn't do too much damage, so when I was able to cast offensive spells it made a huge difference.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

I missed a day of writs, so can double up today. Bonus content: The dire bear (summon creature 5). I'll be going to the troglodytes, the harpies, and secure the crossing.



Crossing:
The bear took damage from time to time, usually from the more difficult enemies. I did a lot of passive healing. This writ did not need a sequencer, it's not that hard of a writ.

Troglodytes:
This is the big scary one. I used a divine sequencer after the first few groups.
Made use of div power/div favor/magic missile right away to take out the dart throwers. I'm running out of all of my magic missile casts very quickly, I'm suspicious div favor might be bugged again. This task alone cost 5 of my 7 magic missile casts. I still ran out before div power wore off.
The bear is taking a lot of hits here and there, I need to be on top of casting passive healing throughout the dungeon.
I've started casting imp invis on myself and infinicasting inflict minor wounds, it's working better now that things hit me less. I'm still missing a lot of the time though.
The boss is still extremely difficult. It has invis purge, summons 2 zombie warriors that hit really hard, and can daze and turn my summon. On top of that it's a phylactery boss. I rested before the boss to restore my spells.
My first summon was dazed and died, so I summoned a 2nd summon and quickly threw another divine sequencer on it. The boss turned it, so I ran back to the pre-boss area to wait for the fear to wear off. I swapped from divine sequencer to arcane, this made the biggest difference. The zombies stopped ripping it apart so quickly. When I returned I sent the bear after the zombies while I hasted myself and used div power/magic missile to destroy the phylactery.


Harpies:
The bear still has the arcane sequencer active.
The harpies did a lot of nickel and dime damage to it. The attack range on them is huge, they attack me any time I try to cast cure minor wounds on my bear even though they're in front of the bear and I'm behind. But I'll be real, after accomplishing the Troglodyte boss this was nothing, I had spells left so began blasting everything to make it end sooner.


Summary:
I noted before that the bear gets stuck wanting to knock things down, but its AB isn't good enough for it to do that. So there's periods where the bear's attacks will keep missing a lot. It's much more noticeable if I'm not helping supplement the damage with spells, the bear takes forever to kill things. The 1 AB from the divine sequencer doesn't help with this.
It's a lot tankier than the spider, but I don't think it trivialized content. I had to be on top of healing it the entire time. When I switched to casting inflict minor wounds, the bear's HP began dropping low enough that I had to switch to healing again. Overall I didn't feel overwhelmed with damage like I did sometimes when dealing with the spider, but the bear isn't a flawless tank either. If I pulled 2 groups of enemies, I'd have to get some healing in before the encounter finished. Overall I used about 30 heal kits, most of them on the troglodyte boss before swapping to the arcane sequencer.