Gairnulf

I think it's blatantly obvious that a +5 weapon is superior to weapons below +5. And also, that doing PoE's items' maths is more difficult than scrolling past the description.

The reason PoE's descriptions can hardly ever be easier to read, while still providing the full stats of an item, is in the way they are calculated. Combining additive and multiplicative modifiers is the main cause of this mess.

Since you're replying to claims I haven't made, I'll quote what I said one more time: And in my opinion such a claim is ridiculous. A lot better and easier to read than BG2. Right.

Even if we forego all "fantasy world-related" reasons, which in itself is absurd when discussing weapons in a game set in a fantasy world - because of differences in quality. I agree. And my point is, there is nothing unique about the so-called "unique" weapons. You can enchant a regular estoc and raise it to higher quality than the estoc you get from killing the strongest enemy in the game. I don't see how this is good design. @Elrond, it's the presentation of the weapons' stats which I wanted to point out as bad. It doesn't allow the player to quickly assess - is this weapon better or worse than what I currently have? How much better or how much worse? For comparison: A lot more memorable and easy to read, isn't it? Just for the record, I was making energetic suggestions that the item descriptions be reworked back in the beta. This isn't to say I think the developers are stupid, and no one but me sees these things. I imagine the devs were too short on time though, and such issues were considered a luxury to fix.

"Really stand out"? Quite the opposite. Categorizing every weapon by the same scale kills all notion of uniqueness. The blade of the endless paths is simply a "Superb Estoc" with Speed and Marking mods. Even the damage is the default Estoc damage. Marking weapons like this is a mistake and I hope the designers take note of it for PoE 2. Just look at this mess:

Either it's good balancing or opaquely presented rules.

Is the wiki still supported by anyone? I went there yesterday and fixed the details on level 1 wizard spells because there was literally not a single spell with correct and complete data. I also think Obsidian, because nobody else can tell for certain on this, should provide some data on attack/recovery/reload speeds calculation, so it can find its place in the wiki.

I was looking at spell descriptions while updating the wiki and came across this: It says 0 seconds. My Dexterity is 18. When using the spell it works normally. I think just the description is wrong.

I'm currently doing a solo playthrough on PotD, haven't yet reached Raedric's Hold. It feels difficult, I'm required to pay attention to weapon stats, deflection/accuracy, potions and power ups. In other words, I'm actually playing the game as opposed to going through beautiful areas and reading dialogues. I miss the party management though. I wish the game could be as difficult but with a party. With my previous playthrough (hard difficulty), where I have a party, I entered the expansion areas at level 9, chose to scale up encounters and it felt just as difficult as I would want it.

So, I was wondering if many people are like me, setting the game to switch game speed to slow during combat. I'm curious how people play in combat in general.

My thoughts exactly. And I'd also add to that - we need combat redesigned, with some sort of pauses between characters' actions, so that they don't overlap so much and hence combat is easier to follow. Outside of TWM (which plays considerably different, and better than the base game, if you get in TWM around level 9-10), combat becomes too chaotic to control, but at the same time there is no real reason to try to control it because it's easy enough to win almost every combat with the same couple of tactics which are well known by now. IMO, to become more interesting/challenging/tactical, combat has to be slowed down, but I don't mean slowed down as in how many seconds it takes to complete an animation, but slowed down through intervals between characters' actions, like in the IE games. I'm playing with the "automatically go to slow mode during combat" option on, and once the IE mod has a version for 2.02 I'll use even slower than the "slow" setting provided by the game. I'm curious how the majority of people are playing and if they're using the same option. The other thing that could make combat more interesting and difficult is scripting enemy behavior for certain encounters, which if at all possible, would still require manually going through encounters. Not as easy as bumping up stats through the Unity editor. I'm curious if there are scripted encounters in TWM and to what exactly is TWM's better combat owed to. I have my observations, but I wish I could hear it from a dev who has worked on TWM's encounters.

As long as I play with a party, I also find it too easy.

I doubt anyone would tune the base game encounters. Like 99% certain they won't.

By "undertuned" you mean too easy or too difficult?

I like baklava I've been arguing for some time that granulating effects down to tenths of a second, plus the overall relatively low difficulty (you have to play on at least hard for some challenge, and to make pausing required) leads players to a situation where they never need to learn the combat rules, because it's faster to just "tank & spank" or "select all + right click on enemy", and because everything happens so fast, it's also impossible to tell how much better it is to be .5s faster than .2s faster. I guess with PoE being crucial to Obsidian's survival they aimed to make the game very accessible and didn't want to take chances, I don't know. The average player has little idea what "+3% action speed" means (for example), but intuitively, it doesn't look like anything important ("just 3%? So what?"), and since he/she doesn't need to know the rules to win in combat anyway, you end up not having the knowledge needed to tell the quality of a piece of equipment neither by looking at its description (because you don't need to know what these stats mean), nor by trying it out in combat (because you win combat with mundane and with unique weapons all the same). At least that was my experience until I started playing solo. Soloing really helps you learn the rules and it suddenly questions like "does this spell attack deflection or reflex" become important. I'm kind of sorry I miss out on the party management, but the game gets too easy as soon as I have more than one party member.

Sagani's companion is a snow fox. Pardon my ignorance, but what does it matter if you're playing a "ranged" ranger or a melee ranger? PoE doesn't feature penalties for using a ranged weapon at melee distance anyway. As far as I know, and correct me if there are other cases, the only instance where being at range from an enemy makes a difference, is if you are a Wood Elf, which gets you a bonus to accuracy if attacking targets at a distance of 4 meters or more. That's if you are playing with a party. If you're playing solo, you're pretty much always fighting in melee with at least one opponent. In the whole of PoE there are no enemies that will only fight ranged and try to kite you (which is a pity). That's my question. On a sidenote, I want to say I agree with this: The infinite inventory (aka "the stash") is a uniquely bad idea and I was saying this as far back as the backer beta times. Managing finite resources and choosing between tradeoffs is one of the core things that a game is about. When you remove the restriction on a resource (inventory space), you remove part of the fun. Yeah, but this leads to people feeling like this: And I share that feeling myself. I don't think that being a low to mid-level adventure is a logical explanation or an excuse for having boring and samey "unique" items which only look different but hardly give you a noticeable improvement in your combat performance.

I would welcome a fix for the inventory bug. I just started a game in 2.02 and it's not cool at all. You pick an item from your inventory and, while you are "carrying" it in your mouse pointer, another item pops in its place straight from your stash. Combat is very much broken and IMO needs a redesign from the bottom-up (for PoE2) in order to pose challenge and offer variety in the way the IE games' combat did. TWM was a step in the right direction, mainly thanks to the improved design of encounters and areas, probably a result of Obsidian's experience built up while working on the base game. I'm just skeptical about what can be accomplished with the current base-100 system which granulates effects down to hundreds of a second.

Things are looking up. I knew I shouldn't start playing this game until it's actually finished.

EA wouldn't have helped PoE. I think one more year of development would have. Now I have to wait for it to hopefully become playable with one playthrough stopped before the end of Act 2. BTW one of the consequences of releasing the game in a half-complete state is that it has the most useless strategy guide I've ever seen. Factually wrong, lacking useful statistics, and totally outdated. If I hadn't bought it just so I could give more money towards the game development, I would have been really pissed, now I'm just disappointed.

What an incredible thread - people who don't understand PoE's game mechanics are defending it from those who understand them. Please carry on.

Bug still present in 530. Really?!

The image used on the Hearth Harvest hatchet is either the wrong size or the wrong image. It was curious that the image is actually even larger than the Description window image. So I take it it's possible to make Description images larger than they are right now?

[Description of the issue] When viewing a weapon's description window, stats are based not on the currently selected party member, but on the party member in whose inventory the weapon is. [DETAILED list of steps to reproduce the issue AND what to look for] Example: 1) Place a weapon in the inventory of one party member 2) Equip a weapon of the same class in another party member's quick slot. 3) Have the second party member selected in the inventory screen. 4) View the description of the weapon you placed in the first party member's inventory. 5) Click "Compare" in the description window. 6) Notice that the weapon is "compared" with base stats shown as if it was equipped on the character in whose inventory the weapon is [Expected behaviour] I expected the selected party member's skills would have been used as a base for calculating the minimum-maximum weapon damage. A weapon's min-max damage should update according to which character is selected, not which character has the weapon in their inventory. When people click "Compare" and a window pops up comparing to their currently selected character's weapon, they usually expect that the weapon being compared will also use base stats as if it was on the same character. In the current state of the game, the weapon being compared should be in the inventory of the same party member as the weapon it is being compared to. [Other remarks / Comments] The "Resolution" sabre is in Eder's inventory, but although I'm comparing it to my character's sabre, Resolution uses Eder's base stats to calculate the damage - 17-25 instead of 18-27.

I expected much more from Prima The strategy guide is full of errors to the point where I have to check in the game whatever I read in it. To my great amazement, the strategy guide doesn't even contain a table with party NPCs' attributes.

Upon testing, this causes Jolting Touch on critical hit (only?)