No, staffs will give the autohit capability but eliminate any chance of criticals. I think staffs are most useful levels 7-14 when you have a low percentage chance to get criticals.
Death Hex gives you a 100% critical chance subtracted by your current base critical rate. It's more effective with a low base critical rate.
Thanks, that's what had me confused.
Death Hex: 100% - base critical chance
Staff: base critical chance = 0%
therefore
Death Hex: 100%
I was able to some testing recently due to my PS3 working again and I found out that staves don't have any critical chance, even with Death Hex. You just get whatever damage you normally get with a staff due to your magic score. I then realized, critical chance is a melee modifier, staves are a ranged weapon. It even says'Melee Critical Chance' under the Damage Tab.
If I'm using a melee weapon with Death Hex, it might be the Starfang Greatsword which would be best for these purposes. +3 strength, +8 attack, and +3.5 armor penetration. You'd be looking at about a 8% critical chance, which would equate 92% with Death Hex. You then factor in the 4 second shapechange, and you should have about 6 seconds to attack with your Bear/Spider with criticals. I might use Bear, because after the Hex is over you could add on a followup Slam for another critical and Overwhelm if needed.
That's a bummer 
I didn't get there yet, had little time to play the game lately.
I don't follow the calculations. Wiki says that Starfang Greatsword has 2.55% Critical Chance. Where does 8% come from?
As for duration, it might be a better idea to have a squadmate with Death Hex (like Morrigan, for example) 
I think I must have had Song of Courage on. With 50 cunning-that equates to 7% critical chance, 4.5 extra damage your shapeshifter gets with each rogue in your party. Either that or I used Shale's passive ability with a 5% critical chance boost.
Not a whole lot new, but one spell you definitely want to track if you carry a additional mage in your party is Telekinetic Weapons. It can increase your armor penetraion in shifted form by 12 if you have melee weapons equipped. That got me to about 26 in Bear Form, 33 with Spider Form. Not quite in staff range, but that degree of additional armor penetration can make a difference. For that degree of AP, I used Veshialle/Rose's Thorn. Not something a full spellpower mage could normally do, but I did increase strength/dex to the point I didn't need AW for this mage.
One thing I can finally confirm, having recently done the Morrigan DLC again, is that Intensifying runes do carry over while shapeshifted. That's a good thing, because you'll be much more limited in rogues and subsequently Song of Courage post Awakening. There might be one rogue in golems(been a while since i did it), so you'll be relying more on your weapons, items and Intensifying runes there and in the Morrigan DLC than you do in Awakening for critical chance/damage.There are no rogues at all in the Morrigan DLC, which was a bit of a disappointment to me there.
There are a couple of other runes that I noticed carried over-Immunity, the anti-fatigue ones, and the Barrier runes. You're pretty limited as far as barrier runes acquisition, but you can increase your shapeshifter's armor with them if interested. I have to assume the Dodge runes work while shapeshifted, but it's not really something I can verify. It goes without saying both the Constitution and Willpower armor runes also carry over, but you'll have better things to use for your armor slots.
So before i got the corrupted data message once again, I managed to runs some tests with a high spellpower mage build in Awakening. For the record, if anyone has any idea what causes that message to appear, I'd appreciate it in a post or PM. it only seems to happen when i return to Origins from a save in Awakening. Not sure if it's connected to Awakening or something I do in Origins.
Anyway, I tried a number of different mage builds. I'll start first with the Legion of the Dead builds which add +20 to all stats. The first one I had +30% nature damage gloves and all the usual spellpower boost items, 192 magic, 202 Spellpower, 117 mental resistance, 40% nature damage shapeshifted into swarm form. I t was doing in the range of 79-110 nature damage per hit, at least twice what you get in Origins. More magic and max nature damage would likely see those numbers increase.
next was Bear Form equipped with Clamshell Plate Armor, Veshialle and Fade Wall(Legion). Str 92, Dex 90, 207 magic, 202 SP.142 mental resistance, max physical resistance, 740 health, 540 mana, 54 armor, 141 defense. Normal damage of 79-90, with a slam/critical of 180-200. Critical was 25% with all intensifying runes on veshialle.
Spider-same build as above regarding equipment. 69 strength, 101 dex(bear really catches up to spider with dex), 207 magic, 142 physical/mental resistance. 671 health, 544 mana, 44 armor, 152 defense, 61.3 normal damage. 43 nature damage per second for 3 seconds with Poison Spit, 66 damage for normal damage, 130 damage on a crit.
I also ran some tests with Voice of Velvet equipped with Veshaille, but my impression is those forms missed too much for it to be practical, along with needing 40 dex with your mage to equip Voice of Velvet.
On other weapons other than veshialle, if you can find other weapons that approach a 10% critical chance in Awakening, go for it. I just stick with veshaille cause I haven't found anything comparable for my purposes.
None of these are optimum builds, although I'll admit I had a few extra stat points because of duplicated tomes-say 30-50. Also, you can only equip significant strength boosting gear like clamshell if you have the arcane warrior spec or that level of strength to equip it.
On PC, there might be a few extra ways to increase strength to a relative level for Bear and Spider. The speed of Swarm Form means it might do the most DPS compared to the other forms, and it's a lot easier for a mage to increase magic.It's all about what sort of shapeshifter form you like the best.
One thing I realized I never did was carry over Darth's research regarding attack speed for Swarm from looking at the toolset. The below information is taken from the thread Ranger Pet Stats, where you can also find good data regarding the abilities of ranger pets and their abilities, stats, and levels::
"The attack speed of pets and shapeshifter forms is animation-controlled, like for all non-humanoids and toons without weapons equipped. This means that Swift Salve and Haste don't have any effect on attack speed, and also that scripts cannot easily query or measure the effective attack rate. Swift salve and Haste do affect movement speed, however-my note.
Quote
2. Swarm Form-the wikia mentions it's the fastest, but doesn't give a attack speed. Is the attack speed for Swarm Form in the toolset?
The 'attack speed' of the Flying Swarm form is the rate of its AoE tick, once every 1.5 seconds. Movement speed is 2. I couldn't find the AoE radius in the scripts or in the game data tables; however, it must be around 5 metres. Damage is attenuated to 50% at a distance of 3.8 metres, to 25% at 4.5 metres. The damage per tick is effectively
(5 + SP/6) * (1 + R)
with SP being spellpower and R a random floating point number in the range [0, 1).
I had Fiona equip Wade's, Andruil's Blessing, the High Regard, Cailan's Arms and Lifegiver for the tests, resulting in 12.8 mana regen and 3.7 HP regen. In that getup the Flying Swarm could tank two darkspawn melee grunts pretty much forever, and it had a good chance of taking out an elite bronto or emissary. Pity that the swarm leeches health, not mana.
Depopulating the Dead Trenches with shapeshiftery was a lot of fun, by the way, and it confirmed the amazing synergy between Shapeshifter and Arcane Warrior. Even down to the fact that both profit equally from a bit of STR or DEX for boosting attack. "
My notes on the above formula is that it doesn't seem to account for a swarm form utilizing nature damage, or taking effect of negative damage after using a hex, Factor that in, and you likely have a formula close to the one below.1.05 is minimum nature damage, 1.5 is max nature damage at 50% and 2 is the above with utilizing a hex to reduce nature damage resistance . The 1.05-2 is optional if you use nature damage with your Swarm Form:
(4 + SP/6) * (1 + R(0.1-1.0))*(1.0-1.5) nature damage*(.15-2.00) resistance/debuff- Swarm Form Formula
The other formula I have is one regarding flanking, also credited to Darth. This will come into play if your bear or spider use critical attacks.
Check out the 'Improved Shapeshifting' mod on Dragon Age Nexus mod site which might address some issues...
Check out the 'Improved Shapeshifting' mod on Dragon Age Nexus mod site which might address some issues...
The mod seems really interesting. I like Wolf, but it'd be a hard thing for me to switch out Spider to add Wolf in. I'm a long time console player as well.
I'm currently doing a fair amount of experimentation with Poison Spit. It seems to slowly scale with you spider's dex, then multiplying the degree of nature damage along with whatever hexes your mage might have used prior. Say:
. Example last night-I did 23 normal damage a second with my spider, then used a nature staff and did 25. 33 with a basic hex, and then 35 per second with hex and nature staff. This is with a fairly low spellpower mage, so you can imagine how much damage Poison Spit could do once you get spellpower really high. Unfortunately, Poison Spit seems to work with high spellpower, whereas critical damage with spider requires a melee weapon. It's a bit of a hybrid, and it'd be hard to be good with both.
I'm still trying to determine if the third arcane skill will affect both swarm and spider as far as damage, but that will take a bit of time to test.
edit-formula seemed to be off so I'll do some more experimentation on it. I'm thinking right now 0.5 X magic score for nature damage-normal damage, but I'll have to follow the scaling before i can draw any conclusions.
Modifié par Mike3207, 16 avril 2016 - 05:40 .
I couldn't find the AoE radius in the scripts or in the game data tables; however, it must be around 5 metres. Damage is attenuated to 50% at a distance of 3.8 metres, to 25% at 4.5 metres. The damage per tick is effectively
It's 4 metres (from AOE.xls). Doesn't make much sense with their radius scaling, but hey.
It's 4 metres (from AOE.xls). Doesn't make much sense with their radius scaling, but hey.
Yes, it was just an oversight on my part. I went ahead and edited it according, and will do so on the wikia as well. I'll also need to check that I have the nature damage scaling proper as well.
Looking at the wikia, it seemed they never accounted for the increase in elemental resistance from 75% to 85% in Awakening. Given .25 for 75% resistance, you're probably looking at .15 for max elemental resistance for updated range of (.15-2.00) for resistance/debuff.
It's not really the radii of the swarm itself that scales, moreso the swarm's proximity to enemy combatants that scales. The multiplier varies from 1 which is just base damage, to double damage if you get the full 1.0 with proximity. It's a random floating number which means you likely have limited control over the damage, but I'd theorize from the distance research you would get the higher floating numbers the closer you were to the enemies more often than not.
Modifié par Mike3207, 09 avril 2016 - 03:19 .
Nice! I will keep this thread in mind while building Morrigan.
Glad I could help. Keep in mind both Morrigan and Wynne make less effective shapeshifters(at least on console) because they don't have access to a number of the events that will give a Warden more potential stat points and they divert a number of points to abilities other than magic and strength, both of which are useful to a pc shapeshifter.
There are ways to duplicate tomes and give both companions more points than you would normally get in a clean playthrough, but I'll be the first to admit that isn't for everyone. I also haven't been able to duplicate tomes recently in a playthrough without the data being corrupt, but that might be related to also importing dlc items into awakening.
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