GreyZ

Could this be added to the topic? Would really love if driving flight finally got a proper fix... https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/79539-105-v567-new-blunderbuss-driving-flight-bug/

If a Ranger has Driving Flight and the shot bounces, the Blunderbuss innate DR reduction is only applied on the first pellet, not on any subsequent pellets. If you only hit one target and the shot does not bounce it works fine. Other DR reductions such as penetrating shot still apply on all pellets consistently.

The difference is that the game approaches those themes with an appropriate seriousness and does not take them lightly. Not the same as making a joke at the expense of a group of people that have historically been oppressed and still severely are in large parts of the world.

Marked Prey seems to do the same thing with the blunderbuss, where the dmg bonus bonus is multiplied with each pellet. Combined with Stalkers Link it leads to some wacky, nigh infinite damage

Expected Result: Each pellet from the blunderbuss receives +20 to accuracy from Stalker's Link Current Result: The accuracy bonus is multiplied with each subsequent pellet, ie: First pellet receives +20 bonus Second pellet +40 bonus Third pellet +60 bonus and so forth It can be observed clearly in the combat log and leads to extremely impressive amounts of crits

so what do you use them for? you use them to generate flanking bonus, additional interrupts, buff your ranger damage and as a tool for the engagement system, for example you can fill up an enemies engagement limit so you can have another party member move without creating disengagement attacks. Very useful for ranged party members who are getting attacked by someone who slipped past your front, such as enemy rogue NPCs with escape. Having an additional body in the field is a quite powerful utility with the engagement system. It's generally better when engaging to let the pet lag behind your front tanks, see how the enemies engage your party members and then use the pet to respond accordingly. All enemies are melee and engaging your tanks? Use the pet to generate flanking bonus for them. An enemy moving past your frontline towards your ranged? Intercept with the pet and force it into engagement and your ranged characters can burst him down without suffering interrupts to their reload and recovery. See a ranged attacker in the back? Move your pet to engage and generate some interrupts and a bonus for your ranger to take him out quickly, the AI might even decide to use a disengagement ability, causing it to spend recovery time where it's not dpsing your party.

Sorry but you are comparing dual wielded sabers to a bow. That is a complete oranges to apples comparison, since you are much more comparing the weapon groups than the classes itself. If we just wanna compare whatever loadout, then here I'll go with lvl 8 offensive dual saber specced fighter against a blunderbuss ranger, both solo: fighter: ranger (weapon swap): ranger (no weapon swap): End results? Fighter dies, Ranger wrecks the entire enemy party in less time than it takes the fighter to die if you weapon swap, and if you don't swap will still win the fight easily. If you wanna argue that ranged weapons have poor sustained damage, then by all means, but the ranger class in itself isn't the culprit then. And I really don't agree personally that all ranged weapons are subpar. Bow's are overall pretty meh, but Arbalests and Rifles? They're pretty damn good at gibbing people. And thanks to swiftaim the Ranger has by far the highest attack speed with those in the game aside of weaponset swapping.

Reminds me a lot of my older brother, actually. He played a lot of PC games when he was much younger, Myst, Diablo, Doom, along with me, but he was never really a gamer, and has since regressed into console-based ineptitude. Auto-aim FPS:s that play themselves for him is his bread and butter. He's got cash coming out of his ears while I have a computer just about to turn 10 years old that's just short of catching fire - I'm pretty sure that if it wasn't overheating, there'd be enough cobwebs in it to stop the fans - and I still laughed at him when he showed off the "amazing" physics and graphics of Battlefield Whatever. All I thought to myself was "this is what console gamers peasants actually believe!". There's precisely three things controllers do better. Platformers, Sports Games, and Fighting Games. I think you might be reading a bit too much into someones preference of what input method they want to use for a game, it's all just about personal comfort Sure if I play multiplayer I'll always use kb+mouse for best precision. But when just relaxing and playing a singleplayer game? I'll do that wherever I'm most comfortable and alotta times that's not necessarily in front of my desk And the controls of a game don't have to be simple in order to be playable with a joypad. For example I wrote a custom profile for VTMB, and I could map all the controls and even all the disciplines to the joypad by making good use of shift modifiers. And many turn based games are also easily playable with joypads or touch screens since they don't require much precision in the first place. I'm actually quite looking forward to when they add joypad controls to Wasteland2 so I can play that on the big screen.

I reaaaally hope so, one thing I dont need from IE games is the equivalent picking up companions at a higher level and having them be stuck with low hp rolls and terrible weapon proficiences and terrible thief skill distributions

Is there any information on if they level scale when you recruit them or if they come with preset talents? (ie do you risk picking up gimped versions if you do not recruit them asap)

Yeah and quite frankly if you are diligent with keeping debuffs up on enemies, a rogue will out damage any other class, be it ranged or melee if they are specced for it And actually in a prolonged larger engagement a ranger doesn't stack up too bad against a rogue. Since you are not dependent on debuffs to max out your damage, you have some fantastic modals, you can have driving flight which passively gives you even more damage and you have an encounter ability that gives +100% damage on an attack (albeit over an insanely long duration). That all adds up to some respectable sustained dps. Granted alotta fights can be solved by instagibbing most of the enemy force wth quad blunderbuss, no argument against that, but some of the bigger encounters that I've seen do profit from having a solid sustained damage instead of just burst. For me it's also personally a toss up between the two, but I think I might end up going with the ranger. I just enjoy the micro of the pet and the uility you get through it. Plus I like having my wolf right from the start of the game until the very end as my permanent companion, I'm just sentimental like that :D

I find rangers quite fun. They're very micro intensive if you want to use the pets effectively, but I enjoy that. Simply having an additional body in the field gives you a nice tool for the engagement system. I've mainly used wolves personally due to their high movement speed and since they can disengage pretty easily. I will typically have my tanks engage the enemy first before I send the pet in, to avoid it being the sole engagement target of an enemy. I'll then use it to create flanking for my melee characters or send it at targets of opportunity. Another great use is to your pet to peel off engagement if an enemy makes it through your front (like a rogue with escape). You simply put your pet on that enemy and that can allow your ranged characters to retreat without provoking disengagement attacks since it will fill up the enemies engagement slot and you don't need to pull any of your main melee party members back to do that or waste recovery on a disengagement ability. The pets are just a really cool tool and I feel people tend to not micro them enough to get the most out of them (which is understandable since not everyone likes to micro as much). Just gotta be especially careful to not cluster them with the rest of your frontline if you're facing an enemy with AoE attacks. And of course your pet adds free interrupts on your enemies, which reduces some damage on your team. And yes some dps but it's not enough to be worth mentioning, they're far more utility than damage. Also love to use the wolf for scouting due to hits high movement speed. As for the ranger himself, well as has been mentioned you can do melee builds if you go full on pet link build. Personally I prefer the ranged builds. Doesn't have the burstiness that a rogue marksman has, but it's by no means bad. I tend to go for gun multi-gun set builds, which works really well with the ranger. For one you have the Vicious Aim modal which is perfect for that since it increases your damage and hit chance quite significantly at an attack rate loss which doesnt impact you much in this case. Combine that with Penetrating Shot talent (you can have both modals active at the same time) and you output some respectable damage. If you're going for a single heavy hitter ranged build like an arbalest or arquebus without set switching I would go for Swift Aim and Gunner, combine that with a high dex and you can get an insanely high reload speed that no other class can match. And of course you have Wounding shot which is ok. On paper it does a very high amount of damage, the problem though is that the DOT effect is over a waaay too long time, so it will only be max effective in prolonged fights and can also be countered by some spells. But it also has two engagement uses straight off the bat, which is ok considering the total damage on it. If they reduced the time on the dot, this could be a great ability. Add to that Driving flight which adds a fun shotgun effect to your attacks and lets you wipe out mooks very efficiently especially with an arquebus or arbalest and altogether the ranger has a pretty respectable sustained ranged damage. Also Master's call is an awesome awesome ability, if you micro your ranger and pet to get the most out of it.

True, might is very straight forward, can't really go wrong with it. But looking at it from a endgame min-max perspective you can stack very high amount of damage multipliers in the late game through weapon quality enchants, secondary damage, slaying, modals, talents, sneak attacks, crits etc and might doesnt scale with anything, while recovery scales with everything. If you for example ended up with a 100% damage bonus through all of that, every % of attack speed increase gives you twice as much dps as every additional % of damage bonus. So the big factor is how much DR you need to expect in the late game, that's a big deciding balance factor. So for example a high dex rogue with an estoc could be dishing out significantly more overall dps than a high might rogue, depending on available equipment and endgame dr of enemies.

well just a very simplistic example for weapon damage: 1 attack per second 10 base damage + 20% dmg through some talent + 10% through enchantment = 13 dps 1 attack per second 10 base damage + 20% dmg through some talent + 10% through enchantment + 20% through might = 15 dps 1 attack per second +20% speed bonus (so effectively 1.2 attacks per second ) 10 base damage + 20% dmg through some talent + 10% through enchantment = 15.6 dps Since damage multipliers are additive in poe, the more you stack, the more you end up profiting from an increased attack rate. Of course this is just theorycraft, but it's just something to keep in mind in regards to recovery bonus scaling. Basically any damage multiplier you have will scale with reduced recovery times, which is not the case with might. Not trying to say Dex is better or even as good as might, I don't know the game anywhere well enough to make any kind of judgement like that, but it's just important to keep in mind that the math and impact of a damage bonus and a recovery bonus are quite different.

Well what you have to keep in mind though is that reducing your recovery effectively acts as a multiplier for ALL your damage bonuses, while might is only a multiplier for your base damage.

Is there a newer version than 480? Because in that they still have armed to the teeth No - just 480. I've seen somewere the footage from char creation (don't remember where now) - but it was changed. So either there are two v480 ... or idk ... Please confirm - I DO hope I'm mistaken xP Well in 480 they def still have that racial. And what would make this change especially weird would be that there would be no other way to unlock the 4th weaponset without this racial talent. So I also hope you might be mistaken, but guess we will find out next week

Controllers are better suited for FPSs?? There's an opinion I've never heard before. As someone who grew up with Doom,Quake and Unreal I actually play singleplayer fps games exclusively with controllers nowadays Just find it more relaxing on the couch and big screen, I have wireless kb+mouse but they're much more awkward to use when you're slumped back in the couch. They're also great for turn based games, just really not well suited for RTS gameplay like PoE

Is there a newer version than 480? Because in that they still have armed to the teeth

Actually I move melee combatants around quite frequently, to apply debuffs and interrupts when necessary. I mean a warrior with right abilities and talents can engage 4 enemies, often leaving other melee combatants to move as they see fit. So you totally have the ability to sick your more mobile strikers on rear enemies. You can micro around engagement quite easily, hell I even use ranger pets for that purpose a lot (since they arent really good at much else ).

That's what they said it was implemented for, yeah. I'm as surprised as you are, tbh. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/71271-slowed-recovery-while-moving-no-thanks/page-11?do=findComment&comment=1588332 Thanks, I had not seen that one. If this was truly the only intention, the implementation really makes no sense. If someone actually put some thought into balancing different recovery times than I can see reasoning behind this implementation.

nm

I disagree. The mechanic was introduced specifically to deal with kiting. It fails at that, which Sensuki showcases. But you are entirely correct that the engagement system makes melee kiting punitive, and as several others have pointed out, adding this to the already constipated combat movement to the game really doesn't add (or detract, as it is) anything that Engagement hasn't already affected. But the mechanic was created specifically to deal with kiting. And it doesn't. All other discussions as to it's merits or lack thereof are purely academic, since the mechanic fails at it's most basic intended function. The movement recovery penalty has very little to do with kiting (if that was the intention, it really would be nonsensical). As per prior examples it's really a balancing mechanism between different melee archetypes,since it incentives highly mobile character to wear light arms and armor, while encouraging short bursts of movement for heavy arms and armor character, since fast recovery characters are far less penalized than slow recovery characters in this new system.

... I honestly don't know what to say. I realize that most people don't want to read a fourteen-page thread, but at least glance through the first few and the last few. apologies, it's a long thread, I read a number of posts, but I possibly glanced over a few I should have read Right and so the way I see it is: I can build a fighter with lets say a big two handed sword and little in recovery bonus. The way I would use that fighter on a micro level is to move him short distances between targets, to minimize the movement recovery penalty I would incur, ie I would not try to move him from the front to the enemies rear and instead move him short hops If I wanted a striker type of character to cross large distances on the battlefield I would use a leather+dual dagger person. I really dont think it's a too bad system, since the multiplier can easily be fine tuned based on the average engagement distance you have in PoE (since at the most the party rear and the enemy rear will rarely be more than 30m apart due to distance of ranged weapons)

Since my previous posts seems to have been glanced over, I'll just reiterate: While this is an overall nerf, it is mainly a nerf directed at slow recovery/high damage melee characters, because they were technically more mobile than high recovery/low damage characters. Due to recovery times a rogue for example with a 2handed weapon was tactically a much more mobile character then a dual wielding dagger rogue, since if micro'd properly he could move a significant distance between attacks without incurring any dps loss, while a character with a very fast recovery rate could barely move without incurring dps loss. Since this penalty acts as an actual multiplier to your recovery time total, rather than being additive like most other boni and mali are, you are exponentially more penalized the slower your total recovery time is. It's a good change imho that gives an incentive to build actual nimble characters as mobile fighters, ie someone equipped with leather and daggers vs someone equipped with a two handed sword and plate.

Respeccing has been around forever. Even AD&D had rules for respeccing proficiencies and wizards of course could "respec" their spells. I can see where people can have issues when respeccing basically wipes your entire character clean and lets you start from scratch since that can hamper the attachment you build with your character. Personally in a game like PoE right from the get go you make some pretty important choices such as race, class, stats and background that already form a strong foundation of your character. I wouldn't see too much of an issue with having abilities and talents be retrainable. It can be a bit frustrating to be stuck with something that turns out to be completely useless for you and not everyone has the time to start a big game like poe all over again.