M4xw0lf

Yes.

There's still quite a lot of things - items, classes, abilities - that are objectively much better than others. There's fun to be had with many builds, but it could still be that your favored build or equipment won't give you a satisfactory experience.

I haven't taken the time so far to tinker with the crew - more or less the only way to do so right now is via console commands, right? Or are there enough ship encounters in the beta?

Rebalancing will happen independently from bugs. Maybe the changes won't be as drastic overall as between PoE 1.0 and 3.0, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Only thing I ever do is sailing straight at the opponent ship and board it, which takes WAY too long.

I'll play on day 1, just as I did with PoE. Coming back to rebalancing and, possibly, new content adds to the long-term motivation and replayability for me.

And what about the barbarian's thick-skinned ability? The boni from wearing an armor on the armor rating against various damage types should still do something for you, shouldn't they? Especially when you go Berserker and get +2 AR while frenzied. I felt fine leather armor was the way to go for all my various Barb builds.

Greetings, sometimes when I use the AI editor, close it, then try to open it again, only an empty frame with no content whatsoever will pop up. This will then stay like this no matter how often I close and open it again. It is not fixed by reloading, only by restarting the game. Not entirely sure what causes this behavior, whether it's right clicking on the symbol, or closing and opening it in quick succession, or if it's entirely random. First attempt at opening always worked so far, though.

Argwes Adra-clad, Tidefall-wielding Barbarian.

Very good points, most of which I also have taken issue with so far.

Ok, now calculate everything with the use of soul annihilation as well!

Well... moar? Of everything?

Going by your calculations, dual sabres should be comfortably better. Maybe I'm just biased towards great swords, so it doesn't feel this way for me :D

So... I recreated my Witch with focus on dual wielding. The important abilities: Soul blade: Draining Whip, Penetrating visions, Hammering thoughts; Berserker: Frenzy, Blooded, Barbaric blow, Accurate carnage, bloodlust, one stands alone. I used dual fine sabres for maximum damage. However, I find it doesn't feel as powerful as great sword + great sword modal + 2handed style instead of dual wielding. I have no accurate numbers for this, but I think the dps with the great sword might actually be better... maybe something with the weirdness of how soul annihilation works. Someone interested in giving this a try as well?

Soul annihilation gives you crazy damage without crits. You can graze enemies for something like 100 total damage with enough focus.

After fiddling with the beta for 18 hours now, I love the great sword with its modal on a Witch. It's not viable for solo because you simply won't hit anything even with the miss to graze gauntlets, but with buffs from your support guys, it dishes out huge amounts of damage. With soul annihilation every second hit is in the region of 100-200 damage, while the autoattacks to charge focus still deal 60-70 damage. Recovery is good when wearing only leather armor, and triggering bloodlust. Didn't bother with any of the other two handers, they probably still suck. Will try dual wielding next, to get a comparison.

Now with way more experience with the backer beta and with my first full custom party, I had way more fun with a Witch main character (Berserker+Soulblade). With buffs to accuracy and defenses from my npcs, his durability was nice and the damage output was crazy. The damage calculation of soul annihilation remains completely broken. I saw damage as high as >190 when hovering my mouse above the combat log event, whereas the combat log itself stated values of 60-70ish, but the enemies dropping like flies confirmed way higher damage. Across all the content of the beta, the Witch dealt around 15000 damage, around as much as the rest of the party combined, and easily more than twice as much as the runner up Roguette, my Orlan sharpshooter rogue. Tanky McTankface, my dual warhammer wielding Devoted/Paladin Moongodlike tank/healbot, only dealt 2-3k of damage, but the AI wouldn't use his offensive paladin abilities, so he could have done way better. My Chanter/Priest and Chanter/Wizard support guys landed somewhere near that rather low damage output, even though the Loremistress did use Minolettas missiles and fan of flames repeatedly.

Two things that just happened to me on the second level of the Engwithan waystation: - combat would not stop after killing all enemies: Room with all the Imps, one of them hit my player character with their -1 empower charge ability, which would not wear off after combat, preventing the end of combat. At least I assume that was the reason. No counter was showing with the status effect, waiting for around half a minute didn't help. Reloading and killing the imps again solved the problem. -unkillable skeleton summon: In the northwestern room with the named Engwithan Saint (Xakoras?). The mummy priest thing came alive, and while it was still summoning his animats and skeletons, it already died. Most of his summons died with him, but one skeleton remained. It then was untargetable (didn't even have a selection circle), but continued to attack and deal damage to my party.

Does the full attack from cleaving stance trigger carnage?

i5 2400 16GB DDR3 Ram 480GB SSD Crucial BX300 Radeon R9 Nano LG 27UD58 27" 4k screen (with Freesync) If RAM prices were not as ridiculous as they are right now, I'd have upgraded to a Ryzen system by now. Deadfire already looks so much nicer than PoE, all the backgrounds seem to be in higher resolution and look glorious on an UHD screen.

Yes I have briefly thought about this as well, and I think this would still be viable if those effects were simply mitigated by the same modifier which is used for calculating the carnage damage, which is something like 30%? So we'd deal 30% of damage in the carnage AoE and deal afflictions with 30% duration, or with 30% strength, where applicable. Of course this value might still need to be lowered, but I don't think it would be so impossible to balance this.

We need weapon procs back on carnage, without that, Barbarian is not really worth the reduced durability in comparison to Fighters and Paladins.

You mean the combination of ranger and paladin, or ranger + x / paladin + x?

Concentration has no duration, you have it and you have it until the end of combat or get netrulized by interruption. And you get 1 layer of Concentration with combat focus. I'm a bit confused on how this system works. Has it been changed from PoE1?

A question on the 'combat focus' ability: description says you gain concentration at the start of a fight, but how much and for how long? Is it a flat bonus, or based on your stats, and is it for the whole encounter or for limited time? Could be a very good or very meh ability.