Zwiebelchen

The problem is mostly that all your defenses are temporary. Rest spamming is not an option for some.

It's actually both. Some elements of the game simply grant too much xp (again, bounties and traps). Fixing the XP curve on both ends (xp gained and xp required) is a good idea.

If you read the suggestions in this thread carefully, you will notice that 80% of the suggestions take the non-completionists into account and try to avoid changes affecting them. Everyone is aware that this is a legitimate playstyle.

You sacrifice lots offensive potential for this, though. Getting to 21 CON is not trivial and comes at a huge cost. What do you mean? http://i.imgur.com/erC68ol.jpg +24% action speed from dex?

What difficulty setting do you play? Especially on higher difficulty settings, the beastiary XP is heavily front-loaded, as higher difficulties tend to place some higher-level foes in early game encounters (that you would otherwise only encounter later in medium or lower difficulty). This leads to the effect that in Hard and PotD you actually level even faster than in medium or easy. Also, bounties. Bounties are probably responsible for the majority of the excess XP.

You sacrifice lots offensive potential for this, though. Getting to 21 CON is not trivial and comes at a huge cost.

It definitely depends on your build and difficulty level. Due to the DR mechanics, low Might characters should use slow or penetrating weapons to actually deal any damage. But good luck using a fast 1H weapon with those... Flails for example are great for low-Might tanks and deal way more damage than almost any other one-handed weapon for them. Axes are great for hard-hitting foes, but you will mostly deal minimum damage only. I agree about the variety of damage types, though. Most of the enemies have pretty balanced damage resistances against all weapon types. There's just a few outliers that have heavily distorted damage resistances. There should be more, but imho, there's bigger fish to fry atm.

Yes. But the accuracy is compared against the defenses of the enemy, not deflection, as mentioned in the tooltip. Also, certain spells have a bonus or malus accuracy. So, for example, a spell that targets reflex at +10 accuracy would calculate as follows: Attack roll + base accuracy + spell-based accuracy bonus - reflex defense. If the result is above 50, the spell hits. If not, the spell misses (if it's a binary spell without a damage component like a crowd-control spell. Damage spells can grace.). This makes accuracy the most valuable stat for any caster or DPSer. The only classes that get away with low accuracy scores are probably heal-centric clerics and tanks. So, yes, using a +accuracy weapon on spellcasters is a good idea.

I actually like that the difference between weapons matters, but is not as big as that it would lead to cookie-cutter choices in general. We don't want to limit the RP'ing too much, don't we? I think Obsidian nailed the weapon design in this game in the way that I don't gimp my character when selecting an odd weapon choice for my class, but it also allows some min/maxing for the completionists. Obvious examples: +accuracy weapons vs. +deflection weapons. Or armor penetrating weapons for low Might characters. There are plenty of tactical choices, but they won't turn combat upside down. And that's a good thing in my book. If anything, you could argue that slow weapons are a bit too strong compared to faster weapons, as most enemies have high DR scores. But imho that's nitpicking. The faster ability recovery makes up for that mostly.

1) I wouldn't mind trap XP being removed completely, but this would affect early-game XP rewards alot, and we don't want to cut those too much (especially with all those other balancing changes in my suggestion working in tandem) 2) The only two break points that really matter in the game are grace-to-miss and hit-to-grace, as the crit treshold is so high that it almost never happens for enemies, hence why it's 30 deflection for a tier change (okay, it's actually 35 because 50 for grace minus 15 for miss, but nvm). 3) I'd use 4% recovery penalty reduction for every point over 10. That means on 10 you don't have any changes, 14 equals -16% (which allows a heavy robe) and 17 equals -28%, which is medium armors. Consider temporary bonuses through food and resting and it's perfect. You don't want to start the recovery penalty reduction below a CON score of 10, so that wearing no armor is still a viable option. 4) Monks are intended as tanks; the wound mechanic actually supports the idea of tanking monks. With appropriate build, they are actually quite good tanks with some nice utility spells on top. It's just that constant recovery makes Fighters to OP in comparison.

Fixes some graphics errors for lower end DX11 cards.

I think the difficulty and XP issues shouldn't be fixed with just flat out increasing the amount of XP needed for higher levels. Extreme changes usually tend to break other things, like forward compatibility with addons and DLC extending the level cap, etc. The best possible fix is not overtuning one mechanic. It is rebalancing on all fronts with only slight adjustments working together in the grand scheme of things: --> adjust the XP curve beyond level 7 slightly upwards towards exponential progression (I'd say change the 66.000 XP total to reach max level to 85.000 XP total). --> drastically reduce bounty rewards ... those are just way overtuned. --> reduce trap disarm XP by at least 30%. This is heavily overtuned anyway. You get almost 1000 XP from traps in Raedrics Hold alone. The quest XP reward is only twice that! --> increase accuracy values of all hard mode enemies in act 2 by 5 and act 3 by 10. This will also affect PotD, so that's a pretty elegant solution in combination with... --> ...a rebalancing of all defensive talents granting deflection. Tune down the deflection bonuses awarded by those talents by at least 30%. Because of the way deflection works, the bonuses are way too large (You can get a flat +30 deflection bonus through talents alone! ... this means all crits get converted to hits and all hits get converted to graces... this is just way too much impact). This will also help to reduce the enormous deflection gap between tanks and non-tanks. --> nerf shields and shield enchants. Seriously, they just got way too much deflection on them, especially when enchanted. Again, a difference of 30 deflection means that all attacks against this target get reduced by one damage tier. Deflection is just way too easy to stack with the current OP shields in the game. 16 base deflection on large shields? --> change Constitution to reduce the recovery penalty of armors. This will also help a lot to reduce the gap between tanks and non-tanks, by allowing casters to wear light and medium armor without too much penalty in DPS. --> nerf constant recovery. Seriously, this ability is just way too strong. Fighters should be at least comparable to monks and paladins in terms of tanking capability. Due to the way endurance works, constant recovery is just overpowered. All this together will most likely already fix the entire game balancing, making "hard" actually hard without affecting those players that play this game for the story and don't want the challenge. All these changes will most likely not hurt non-completionists or non-min/maxers. Note that almost all of these changes are simple number changes. So all this can probably be done in a simple patch, maybe except for the constitution change.

Yay for 1.05 balance changes!

As I said: the game gets A LOT easier in act 2 and act 3, with only very very few encounters that stand out. Just wait for it. You'll definitely notice it once you get there.

The shadow fights are not the reference point for all discussions about difficulty. Shadows are a bitch and everyone hates them (or loves them for the challenge). You're still in act 1? In that case, the problem hasn't manifested for you yet. We are talking act 2 and act 3 mostly. Act 1 is pretty decent balancing-wise.

This. Idea has been floating around since late backer beta and I still think it's the best solution: On top of the endurance/health bonus, simply reduce the recovery penalty of armors by 4% each point (over 10). Obviously, this can not reduce the recovery penalty below zero, so it isn't redundant with dexterity, which increases speed regardless of armor (at a lower rate). So, a character with 14 CON would have a reduced recovery penalty of 16%, allowing them to wear 3 DR robes without a penalty (-15%). A character with 17 CON would have a reduced recovery penalty of 28%, allowing them to wear medium armor without a noticable penalty (-30%). In order to wear the heaviest armor in the game without penalty (-50%), people would require 22-23 CON. So what are the benefits of this? - it makes medium armor more interesting, especially for DPSers - dexterity is still superior when it comes to raw damage output as dexterity boosts all the times, not just recovery and works regardless of armor choice - buff food and resting bonuses with +CON would be way more interesting - still allows people to dump CON if they feel like it (no added recovery below 10 ... only endurance and health loss). Imho, that isn't a real problem. CON should never feel mandatory to your build. Yes, for people who wear no armor, CON is still as useless as ever... but isn't that kind of the desired behaviour? The "classic" glass cannon builds are meant to be fragile, aka low CON. And if you happen to get some; be happy: you can now get some free DR by equipping robes instead of running naked!

This would require a mod to adjust the sizes of various body parts to absurd scale...

This topic again? Besides, here's where you already disqualified yourself: This is not how the world works. "Oktnxbai."

Obviously. But then they'd have to include ALL the textures and model files that were used in the design process of these areas aswell, bloating up the size of the game. And you would also lose the final "paintover" layer of scenery composition, resulting in less visible details.

I agree with the VO being distracting at times. Especially if you use any of the localizations, the english voiceover is very distracting and forces you to read the same text at least twice. I wished there was an option to disable voiceover on dialogues only. If I reduce the voiceover volume to zero, I also lose all other voiceover, like the character responses or warcrys.

Have you checked the stash?

I still see comments about party banter in BG1. Have we played the same game? There wasn't any party banter. Every NPC remained completely silent after it's initial quest?!

This is only true for small-area circular AoEs. For spells that have huge AoEs right from the get-go, the percentual radius expansion means that you get a huge non-friendly-fire area aswell - which is literally all you ever need as enemies like to gang-up on your tank anyway. If an increase in INT would mean I can target 3 enemies instead of 2, then this is fine to me. However, the reality looks more like this: high Int: 10 enemies (basicly everyone around the tank) low Int: 2 enemies (only those on one side of the tank) It's even worse for cone-type spells, which are almost unusable with low int and become complete no-brainers with high int scores. Allow me to illustrate just how completely out-of-whack this mechanic is: The picture displays a common situation in PoE group combat. Especially in PotD, you will most likely encounter large groups of enemies. Grey dots are enemies; you'll have some ranged ones scattered in the room and melees all surrounding your tank (black dot). This is literally how 90% of the fights in this game look like after some seconds in combat. The blue dot is our mage. Notice how a hypothetical no-FF fireball only hits several enemies? As soon as the yellow safezone effect comes into play, the fireball literally destroys the entire room, without putting anyone in the group in danger. Instead of 3 enemies, you hit 7; a damage increase of over 130% just for a couple of points and then we didn't even count the increased duration effect in (notice how a comparable amount of Might only gives you a 20% damage bonus)! Also notice how this example actually has realistic dimensions in terms of collision circles, AoE radius and INT-safezone size (It's pretty much how fireball aiming looks like). It's getting even worse for the cone-example: Instead of 3 enemies, you, again, hit 7. But this time, the mage is allowed to move even farther away from the battle, putting him at an even lower risk at the same time! There is clearly a problem with that, especially on higher difficulty levels. Again, the example I posted is not a rare case scenario. It happens literally all the time.

Does that happen in a new game created in the recent patch directly aswell?

The difference is: PoE is actually a real woman, while games like DAI are more like a lifeless sexdoll (in that example quite literally). ... and at least Sawyer moved away from some of his initial mantras about the mechanics in PoE. We've got plenty of community feedback worked into the game already. And I expect more to come.