Zwiebelchen

I wonder if a war bow user wouldn't be better off going for an extra weapon slot instead of Greater Focus. The extra damage from a Blunderbuss/Arquebus is still very helpful even without a weapon focus talent or quick switch, and it should give you about 7 extra focus anyway (more with buffs). I've found that warbows generally build focus faster and more reliable than blunderbusses/Arquebusses anyway. So using guns for Ciphers is pretty much a waste of talent points in general, unless you attack an enemy with 15+ DR. And even then, the pack you're fighting will probably have enemies with lower DR aswell. For focus generation, faster attacks trumph giant slow attacks. Often you are in a situation where you need to react fast; a terribly slow Arquebus will not do you good there. Granted, you get about 10 focus with just a single attack on an Arquebus. So, getting off a single mental binding will require you to shoot twice with your Arquebus. Miss just once, and you will have to endure another complete loading cycle. A warbow attack only generates about 3-4 focus per hit, but you'll easily shoot twice as fast, leaving you with more opportunity to crit, getting to your next mental binding much faster. And remember that mental binding pretty much indirectly improves your further focus gain as you frequently crit against a stunned unit. Even on a graze, mental binding allows you to hit the target at least twice with your warbow. If you're out of luck, you won't even get a single shot off your Arquebus during that time. Instead of investing 3 points into gunner, quickswitch and an extra weapon slot, better invest into 3 +25% against type bonuses. Combined with another +25% against type bonus on your weapon, you more or less get a flat +25% damage against pretty much all enemies. And as a rule of thumb, kith and beasts mostly have low DR scores anyway, so those are the go-to candidates for skipping.

1. Completely devalued. By having one of their abilities being overwritten by a resource-limited active ability. Sure. 2. As for the "can of worms," I see two. The first is the task of coding your suggested exception where the Paladin's auras (and not other modals) stack specifically with the Priest's spells (and not other active abilities). I don't imagine that's a trivial task. The second is the potentially unbalancing affect of allowing accuracy (or DR) buffs to accumulate without limit, especially with an expansion on the way where they may be considering giving the Paladin access to more powerful auras/upgrades for existing auras, along with more powerful accuracy buffs. The Darcozzi Paladin already has the questionable ability to stack +20 Accuracy on one character by double-casting Inspiring Liberation. Do we really want to see what happens to game balance when a Battlemage is stacking upwards of 90-100 extra accuracy on top of level bonuses and talents? 1. First level priest buffs pretty much become free cast once you hit level 9, as the first level becomes per-encounter at this point. Also, they are not limited to a small AoE around the Paladin. They linger on all characters until the end of duration, not until outranging a certain unit. Also, they don't instantly vanish when the priest dies. I'd say the priest buffs are superior in that regard. 2. I'm not saying that all accuracy or DR bonuses should stack. That would be completely insane. But we are more or less talking a class specific talent here. And talents, by default, stack with everything. The Fighter's Defender ability, for example, does stack with deflection bonuses from priest abilities just fine. The paladin auras are not the rule, they are the exception here. There is nothing to code here; they just need to move the paladin aura bonus into a different bonus pool, just like food stacks with other bonuses. Also, Auras are pretty much the only reason why you would ever take a Paladin in the first place. There's nothing a Paladin can do that a fighter of the same level couldn't do better. If a 9th level priest pretty much removes the advantage of auras, why even waste talent points in them? And even a +20 accuracy buff wouldn't even be gamebreaking. Priests have a 4th level spell that offsets PC and enemy accuracy by a whopping 40 (-20 accuracy for enemies, +20 accuracy for friendlies) in a pretty large AoE. Yet this doesn't break the game. And besides, I never said that other buffs of the Paladin should stack. I only think that Auras currently are useless. Also, if we don't want minor accuracy buffs to stack, why does the +5 accuracy bonus of Inspiring Radiance stack with other accuracy bonuses? That's just another slap in the face for everyone who has both a paladin and a priest in the group.

Holy ****! I'm always amazed at what community modders are capable of. This is the first step into "new quests for the masses" territory. Now what we need next is a simple 3rd party editor that allows creating and placing custom NPCs and monsters. When this is done, I'll volunteer on finishing the "render custom landscapes PoE-style in Maya" tutorial I started long ago. ... I hope we will see the first companion or stronghold mods soon.

Btw, this not only applies to desintegrate, but to many many other DOT abilities aswell.

What can of worms are we talking here exactly? 6 Accuracy is not a game-changer. It's nice to have, nothing more. It's basicly just a party-wide weapon focus. And 3 DR is also nothing, considering you can only select either the accuracy bonus or the DR bonus, not both. Currently, Paladins are the only class that are completely devaluated by the presence of another. In this case, priests. If you have a priest (especially once hitting level 9), your Paladin practically becomes dead weight.

The thing is, as long as you leave a weapons slot for a melee weapon, you don't really need to select any melee related talents just to enhance their melee abilities, beyond perhaps picking a weapon focus group. Since they have the same high accuracy in melee as they do ranged, they can still be effective in melee if absolutely necessary, say, if a shadow has jumped into your rear. So, you can mostly ignore their melee ability and still end up with a respectable emergency melee combatant. There is one thing that you seem to lose by playing a ranger though and it's related to party composition. I personally think that it's nice to have two good frontliners. Only one needs to be a true defensive tank, but it's nice to have a second front liner that's more offensively oriented, though 2 mostly defensive hold-the-line frontliners can do in a pinch. And I like having a Rogue. It's a personal preference to maximize the thieving skills. And also, at the same time, this rogue can fill the slot of strong ranged DPS combatant. Then after that there's 3 more slots that you can fill with casters, preferably one who can do healing (usually a priest), and then a couple of more offensive casters (i.e. wizard, cipher, or druid). Now, the thing is that if a Ranger takes the ranged DPS slot, you lose the thieving skills character. Yes, it can be filled by someone else, though not as well. Or alternatively, you can still take the Rogue in addition to the Ranger, but at the cost of a caster. In truth, for most of the so-called trash mob battles, this isn't a problem. But against the bosses, it certainly helps to have 3 casters. Of course, I suppose that the Ranger could take a bunch of Lore and turn himself into a bit of a "scroll caster" for emergencies, though to be really useful in those boss battles, you'd probably need 8 or 10 points of Lore to cast the really nasty scroll spells like Paralyze or Maelstrom. Anyways, just a few semi-random thoughts... Mages also get a bonus point to mechanics (and a second one with appropriate background), if that is what you're aiming for. So no reason at all why a rogue in a party setup would be mandatory for the thieving skills. I didn't come across a single lock in the game I couldn't pick with a mage at appropriate level. Needless to say, I couldn't disarm all traps I found throughout the game. But then again, one additional point in mechanics would probably not make a difference here aswell. And you can always take the trap to the face if nothing else helps. I agree that rogues and rangers pretty much dwell into the same general direction. You probably don't want them both. But that isn't much of a problem considering that there is no premade rogue companion anyway.

I'm actually pretty glad that Cadegund was dropped in favor for Durance. Judging from my first impression, Cadegund could have basicly gone way in one of two directions, bot not very attractive to me: 1) They designed her similar to Pallegina; being generally uninteresting due to being way too rational and normal. Also, too many "normals" then with Pallegina, Eder and Kana in place. 2) They designed her similar to Durance in her story, but her looks don't support the level of ****ed-up-ness that makes Durance' story believable. About Forton: I guess Obs dropped the idea because he was very cliché to begin with. An eastern, bald monk? Wow, where have we seen that before? From there he could have basicly gone in two ways, both being equally unoriginal: 1) a wise but guilt-driven random past-event troubled guy that wants to redeem himself, cracking know-it-all comments on every decision of the PC. This story would overlap way too much with Kana (know-it-all) and GM (past events redemption). 2) a completely insane, outright evil bastard who just enjoys killing things for the sake of it. Suffers from a lack of motif to hang along with your group and no real reason to beat Thaos.

If you play your ranger more or less as a ranged damage dealer, ignoring the melee potential, they are low maintenance. I don't really consider using your pet to flank the attacked enemy as something that requires a lot of user input. Most if the time, you can't attack the high priority targets with the pet anyway, as the melee access is blocked by other enemies. Rangers are so strong because they can take out the most dangerous foes safely from distance with just a few shots. Especially on PotD when fighting hordes of enemies, I mostly assign Sagani to use wounding shots on enemy clerics/mages, then auto-attack them to death and just use the fox to offtank one or two enemies. Yes, the pets takes damage very fast, but due to how pets and summons work in PoE, this is not really a problem (both health and endurance recover to 100% after every battle, instead of endurance only, so they pretty much are throwaway meatshields). If you drop some healing spells on the pet, they become incredibly potent tanks, soaking up a lot of damage basicly for free, with no permanent penalty. Overall, I've found Rangers to be incredibly useful in my games so far (Rogues deal better ranged damage, but the pet offers an additional meatshield, which is always nice). Much more useful than Paladins, for the reasons listed below: - Lowlevel Paladins have bad defenses AND bad offense. Defender and Vary Defender put Fighters way ahead of paladins in every way possible; compared to that, they talents and class abilities are incredibly weak; Fighters get 2 knockdowns per encounter for free; Paladins get what? A single target one-shot lash effect? Call me impressed... - Even on high levels, Paladins completely lack a clear purpose. They are neither true tank nor true support. The auras suck* (low range and don't stack with priest abilities), Lay on Hands doesn't scale with level, their damage is terrible and they don't have the same tactical fidelity in abilities as Fighters. *This is incredibly emphasized as soon as your party hits level 9. All their auras can be completely devaluated by level 1 priest buffs and at level 9 you can even spam them on every battle. And you can't even activate two auras at the same time! Paladins are literally the only class that is completely devaluated by the existance of one other.

Does he have anything interesting to say? I stumbled upon the shack in my first playthrough and wondered why there was nobody inside. Seems like this is the answer to my question. Some other random thing: If you have the Dyrford piggy in your pet slot, Eder will eventually comment on it. When I heard it, I accidently spilled my tea.

I think it's not that people dislike Kana. I also thought that he was generally likeable. However, I think the biggest flaw about Kana is that rarely anyone ever picks him up to have in the party. Because Chanters more or less only matter in PotD (and only few people play at this difficulty setting) - and even then, their contribution is up to debate. So he suffers from bad mechanics just aswell as Pallegina.

You already do that, they never "discarded" that idea. When you meet Grieving Mother she doesn't even know or notice that you're looking at her soul, and the narrative text states that you could manipulate or violate her soul in any way you pleased and she'd never know the difference. Also when dealing with Icantha in Heritage Hill, you can destroy her pride directly through the soul and she's none the wiser. Besides, what you're talking about is exactly what Grieving Mother did to an unknown number of people, she manipulated or destroyed parts of mothers' souls if there was some element that would cause them not to love their children. Exactly. But there is no "visual dungeon" involved in this. In fact, it's just mere flavour text, which is boring. All of this is delivered completely uninspiring via walls of text. I'd love to have more interactivity here, especially for major events, like eliminating all of GM's memories.

Sure thing, the more symmetrical the ruleset, the better. But let's not overdo it here, innate abilities should clearly be an exception to the rule. Also, story trumphs mechanics. So whenever a story boss or event implies bypassing of game rules, that is fine to me. For example, Thaos summoning those giant statues.

If this isn't just a bug (and I assume it is), then I'm definitely against this. I hope Obsidian reconsiders reputation effecting sell value of items. I am fine with a reduced purchase price, but selling an item should be static revenue.

Ah, we had this topic about 3 days ago already. Go look it up.

Rangers are actually pretty darn good. Vicious Aim and Piercing Shot can stack. Equip a warbow and DPS-city everywhere. They kill spellcasters at maximum range so incredibly fast it's not even funny. Also, they are low maintenance, which is always good if you want some reduced pause spam. Paladin sucks giant balls, though. And I'm not even sure if the 1.06 changes are enough.

You need to be standing kinda close to the enemy for it though. Might be good on melee Wizards, but not so much ranged. I haven't had that much experience with melee Wizard builds admittedly. Though from my experience with tank builds of other classes, Deflection is generally a better source of mitigation than DR in a lot of cases. Arcane Veil is very beast with that massive Deflection bonus, but that's not a spell now is it? ;o You can stack higher deflection on wizards than on any other class. Look at the mirror image spell series. Long-lasting instant-cast buffs without recovery time that get increasingly more potent with progressing level. So you score both high deflection AND high DR, without actually suffering from the accuracy penalty when using shields or the speed penalty from cautious attack (all those penalties only apply to melee attacks). With stone skin and plate armor, you can easily buff yourself into the 30 DR territory. Against elements, you can actually get up as high as 40-45 as a Pale Elf when combined with Bullwark Against Elements. Also, even health isn't a problem for wizards, as Life Infusion actually also heals the 50 health permanently when used.

PotD combines all mobs from easy, medium and hard together. So, no, not all encounters are the same as they are on hard. @thread: I think what ZF and ZE actually needed was the ability to stack with other DR/Accuracy bonuses. I like the Hit/Graze conversion thing being buffed, but I'd rather have the base effects to stack with blessings and priest buffs. Currently, having a priest in your party pretty much suppresses all Paladin abilities - and that with only first level spells used.

Lets take a look at the most commonly spammed and used Druid spells! Sunbeam, Burst of Summer Flame, Firebug, and Sunlance! We can all agree these are top tier spells among the Druid's arsenal. Now what do they all have in common? The others though, yeah it would probably depend on your playstyle. I personally love Returning Storm and Relentless Storm so I end up grabbing Heart of the Storm. Others might not even like them at all and would pass over the talent. At any rate, they're not situational if you get the ones based on the spells you end up using the most frequently, and believe me. I'm almost certain everyone spams the Druid's delightful fiery spells. I will agree on you with Bonus Spells though. They are not even worth the talent slot, since their value gets diminished further and further as your choices of destruction continue to expand. By 9th-level, they're virtually useless since the Druid's 1st level spells are more than enough to annihilate the common cannon fodder encounters anyway. As for major fights, if you need more than four 4th-level or higher spells to nova a target down, you're probably not choosing the right spells at all. You're just assuming spell choices out of your own preference. Yes, I used Sunbeam quite a lot; but Talon's Reach is also comparable on first level and actually faster to cast. Burst of Summer flame actually does very low damage in a small radius. I don't get why anyone would ever use that over the other much better second level spells like Blizzard and Autumns Decay. Also, Insect Swarm and Woodskin are at the same level. I never used Firebug, as Relentless storm and Plague of Insects have a much better return of investment, with the latter actually dealing a sick amount of raw damage over time in a huge area and the former to not only deal huge damage, but also stunning on every hit. And by the time you reach 6th level spells, you will probably rather end up summoning a greater blight or use Venom Blood for the raw damage. So, no taking the fire talent is absolutely not a no-brainer.

I gotta say I always applaude the guys who play this on expert mode. Must be tough; I haven't ticket that box yet... the reason for that is that I found not all reputations perfectly represented in the answers. Often, it's hard to tell, for example, which answer is "honest" or just "rational". "Diplomatic" often didn't feel diplomatic enough for me... more than often I felt that the general response was more diplomatic than the diplomatic choice. Sometimes, "passionate" seems to drift into "aggressive" territory for me. Though the worst reputation, by far, was "clever". I just hated the forced jokes. 90% of them just weren't funny or appropriate. The only "clever" answer in the game that I really liked was when you beat Maerwald and the statue asks you if you beat him, and you tell her that you beat many of him... (because of his split personality) I wouldn't say that this is bad writing, it's just that sometimes the tags are oddly placed, which is why I would never play in expert mode. I agree with what you're saying here for the most part. That said, I wouldn't assume that just because something is tagged "clever" that that means that it's truly meant to come off as humorous to everyone (including the characters to whom the speaker is speaking). "Clever" responses often come off as snarky and aren't well received. And I think that's how it's meant to be, though it seems like an odd disposition for paladins and clerics when you get right down to it. One would think that snarkiness and poor jokes wouldn't really make for a worthy disposition. I'd think that real cleverness would be less about snarkiness and bad jokes and more about inventive solutions to problems and at least a relatively funny quick wit. But oh well. Tbh, I haven't seen "clever" from the "snarky" point of view. Now that you say that, it seems that most "clever" choices are actually more into snarky territory... if we interpret clever as just that, then I think a lot of the written dialogue for it actually make sense. ... which is still somewhat disappointing. "Clever" reputation was the perfect way to lighten up an overall grimdark game. I enjoyed some of the funny responses in the IE games... and I was looking forward playing a "clever" character because of that. But it didn't feel the same, as mostly the answers went straight into ****-territory. In the game, inventive solutions, as you say, are more related to Intelligence checks. Which imho makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't want this tied to a reputation. Btw, the severe lack of lore-check dialogue was surprising. From all the selectable skills, I expected lore to have the most impact on dialogue and quests. But it hardly even mattered in the game. I encountered only a couple of lore checks in the entire game. Now, armed with meta-game knowledge, I mostly specc all my characters the same, including the PC: 4 points in athletics to prevent early exhaustion. 4 points in stealth for all melees to make pre-positioning easier. 8 Lore for Chanters, Barbarians and Rangers, which unlocks usage of almost all scrolls in the game. Max mechanics for Priests. Mages and Druids for traps. Max stealth for Cipher* and Rogue, for pre-combat positioning and robbing of houses. *The most powerful cipher spells are heavily dependant on good positioning. I absolutely love stealthing my Cipher behind an enemy pack and opening the battle with Ectopsychic Echo.

It applies to all abilities, not just spells. However, spores having an endless supply of charm spells can be justified as an innate ability. I can also live with non-humanoid melees having unlimited knockdowns. It's just that for spellcasters, the innate ability excuse doesn't apply. Spellcasters should be limited in their spells exactly as much as players. Enemy ciphers or chanters should play by the rules, not being able to use their spells without focus/stacks. The more symmetrical the design, the more strategical and tactical gameplay can be.

I agree that that particular dragon is a SERIOUS spike in difficulty. So much so that my first two playthroughs I used the "other" way to get around the situation, if ya know what I mean. Honestly though, that particular dragon almost felt so hard that it took too much of a cheesy approach to kill him, though I will concede that some people who may have an extremely good grasp of the game may be able to do it without cheese spamming certain spell scrolls. And yes, I found Thaos to be not terribly difficult. I beat him the first attempt in each of my 3 play throughs, the first play through, I hadn't even buffed my party with various long term pre-battle food and potions. I will say though that if one doesn't do nearly enough of the side quests and gets to Thaos too soon at too low a level, you may have problems dealing with him. And camping supplies would be more of a limit if one role-played the game more (in terms of managing one's camping supplies), rather than looking for every way to get around every rule and limit in the system. However, if people refuse to role play the soft limits and then whine about how there are no limits ... A) maybe the problem is on those players and not the game itself, and/or B) devs might come up with a much more punishing, unfun system that a lot more players would absolutely hate than those who claim that camping supplies aren't really a limit. I will say that it'd be nice if there were random encounters while traveling and there was a chance that resting in the wild could be interrupted by a random encounter, like in the old IE games. Having your rest interrupted was annoying, and yet at the same time an interesting diversion. You actually had to be careful where you rested, unlike in PoE where you can rest pretty much anywhere in the wild with no risk whatsoever of interruption. Actually, if the camping supply limit system were completed (as in, it is no longer trivial to side-step), it could easily be tuned per difficulty setting. Those seeking a challenge might actually get it. There are limitless complaints that hard isn't hard. Heaven forbid someone suggest adding difficulty that isn't just tossing in even more monsters per encounter or giving monsters more HP/damage/special powers/whatever. Respawning monsters is perhaps an ok middle ground. I'd actually like to see both implemented in different places. Given that monster exp caps after killing a certain number, as long as they aren't dropping too much loot on respawn then it shouldn't be an easily abused system. Again, tuned to appropriate difficult settings so there is no room to complain. "OMG hard is hard!" - would be a nice thing to hear, I think. Regarding random encounters, that is also extremely easy to side-step. Just reload the save if you weren't really ready for that random encounter and go again. Basically, it never happened. It's really not random if the player has near absolute control over it. As far as putting expectations on the player to "role play", or in other words, start creating their own rules that are more restrictive than the game rules. That's never a good solution for a digital game. It's nice to leave room for it, but it is never a good solution for game design to just say the players are the problem. Hard not being hard is a design issue. Hardly limitless. Limitless implies infinite, and there are hardly an infinite number of players playing the game. As for people claiming that hard isn't hard, I suspect that these are the same people who are extreme min-maxing their characters. So pardon me if I tune their complaints out. When they're willing to play the game with less than totally OP, extreme min-maxed characters, then their complaints about the game difficulty or lack thereof will matter, because if the devs start scaling game difficulty to make Hard "hard" for the extreme min-maxers, how difficult do you think Hard is going to be for those who aren't extreme min-maxers? Or those who are not hardcore IE and PoE game veterans? As for your random encounter comments, if players are going to skirt the spirit of the game in this way, it's not the devs' problem. It's the players' problem. As for the final paragraph, it's not creating your own rules. It's called playing within the "spirit of the rules", not just the "letter of the rules". If you're not willing to play within the spirit of the rules, again, that's the players' problem not the devs' problem. I think one of the main issues with Hard and PotD is, that the increased stats of PotD are not a toggle option that can be brought into hard aswell. Currently it's: Easy, Medium, Hard as three different creature sets. PotD combining all them plus a severe stat boost for all enemies. ... which is why PotD is such an insane step upwards in difficulty. Not only do you fight masses of enemies, but they are also stronger. I think the stat boost should be an optional toggle like expert mode is, so that it can be enabled on all difficulty sets. So I can play with the creature and spell selection of hard mode, but with the stat boost to compensate for my own min/maxing. Or I can play with the insane amount of mobs of PotD without the increased stats, etc. This would effectively create a middleground option between hard and PotD.

The infinite spells of enemies might not be a noticable problem in lower difficulty settings, but on PotD or any playthrough in which you try something exotic, like rushing the critical path or artifically gimping yourself, this is a real issue, as it basicly renders stalemate situations an automatic loss. And I can see this adding lots of limitations in encounter design for epic level content. Again; I'm not talking about innate abilities. I'm talking about actual spellcasters like mages, druids and priests. Especially Priests are extremely annoying in PoE because of this. On PotD, you will often face giant groups of monsters, often with 2 or more clerics (Xaurips). While you, as in the player, run out of spells very fast, enemy priests can just continue healing their group endlessly. If you don't have a way to stop them from doing so (well... too bad; interrupt sucks, so you're pretty much ****ed if you main ranged DDs are occupied), good luck killing them. Ogre druids are also extremely annoying because of this with their OP 5th level insect swarm and the 4th level boulder spell they just never stop casting. Notice that all these encounters are frequently mentioned when talking about difficult encounters in PotD? That's because the increase of stats really showcases and underlying mechanics issue here: Enemies have high deflection and high DR in PotD. Which means most of your spells and attacks will graze or miss at appropriate character level and deal low damage. So unless you have a severe positioning advantage (doorway cheesing), there is no way to take out spellcasters early, especially if they come in groups. And you can not outlast them either. @Matt516: Running out of spells in a single fight is actually pretty easy, as you only have 4 spell uses per level. Especially on bounties, I've seen priests spam level 5 and level 6 spells endlessly. The cool thing about Vancian spellcasting rules in the IE games was, that while spells were often devestating, enemies couldn't cast them endlessly. Which offered many tactical opportunities in which damage prevention was a legit way to beat encounters. The enemy mage just used his Horrid Withing? Great, now that that is gone, prepare to die! If you couldn't dispel their defenses, you always had the possibility to just buff up on your own protection spells and just outlast the enemy, poking them with sticks. If you try that in PoE, you are pretty much just wasting your spell uses, especially due to the low duration of buffs. What is the point in using a "Prayer Against" spells if they can just keep casting these spells endlessly? And this is not the only case of asymmetrical rules in PoE. What about health? Granted, most classes have 4-5 times the health that they have endurance and in standard cases you will mostly never notice this. But, again, especially on stalemate situations this is a critical factor: even with constant healing, enemies never run out of health.

... is enemies not having infinite spells. It destroys the opportunity for the devs to give enemies one-shot weapons of mass destruction, thus, limiting the choices in encounter design. Plus, it limits the flexibility in player strategy at the same time. Outlast tactics simply do not work in PoE, as enemies never run out of spells. I know that the idea was to avoid "mage chess", but unfortunately this came at the cost of unique encounter designs, as all encounters have to be designed around moderate spell choices that don't punish the player too hard in longer battles. Also this would be an indirect buff for interrupt builds and spell stealing abilities. Both of which are completely unneccesary atm I hope this will get fixed in the future. I get that we probably won't get this in a patch, but this could be part of an expansion, imho. It's imho just inconsistent design that enemy spellcasters ignore game rules completely.

Spot on. The difference between easy and hard in this game is tiny. Mainly the first bear cave and the final fight in the temple of eothas is the only noticeable differences (both of which are easy with a 4-6 man team) That is odd. Often hard adds like two trash enemies that gives extra loot and makes the fight feel more epic (bigger) It does not add any real challenge and in contrast normal doesnt make it easier, not even easy makes it easier. Just very odd design choice. Id say someone who plays on hard at the start learns the game alittle better from start and will have an easier time in the end (because thaos etc are the same on the settings) because of this. So maybe hard isnt 10% harder than easy in the end, maybe its 5% easier. I'd say most of the people complaining about the lack of difference between hard and easy never actually tried the difference and just assume things. Hard does not just add 1-2 more creatures on every encounter. It also changes the abilities of enemies. So, a spellcaster on hard does not have the same spell selection than a spellcaster on easy. Thaos has a different spell selection on easy. Obsidian could have went the cheap way, making the difficulty slider only affect stats. Instead, they went through the hassle to design 3 different encounter sets for every encounter. Yes, "hard" is undertuned. We get it. But at least players could show some appreciation for the extra effort Obsidian put into the difficulty settings.

The lack of acknowledgement for the totally OP defense spells of wizards here is disturbing. You guys seriously need to try tank wizards. :D It's extremely fun, buffing yourself to absurd deflection and DR scores and then just wrecking AoE havoc with little regard for friendly fire (because you are pretty much immune to elemental spells anyway). Seriously, tank wizards get all the cool stuff like spell mirroring, fire shield, stone skin, self-centered AoE debuffs, summoned weapons, etc. Not to mention how ridicolously OP cone and line spells become when you are always at the front line anyway...