Liagod

What is the highest defensive stats (for all four defenses simultaneously) possible for a single character (without equipment) and what is the build specification for such a character? I read somewhere that a paladin at the highest level has all four defenses at about 140 without any gear (no confirming character build was given). Is that the ultimate defensive build?

Everything but the mana sounds good. I would rather have resting or other form of restrictions to spellcasting.

A system that requires special ingredients to cast specific spells sounds great to me. Having a fixed amount of the ingredients required for casting would limit the use of certain spells and be a good immersive feature. What this would mean though is increased restrictions on spellcasting and more planning required by the player, which is not the way Obsidian seems to be leaning.

You have many good points there; a game with vancian magic *can* be done better than PoE1 was. However, the inherent problem is that vancian system, and the whole idea of tying ability access to rest cycles, doesn't really lend itself well to a crpg environment where it is incredibly difficult to model the consequences of skipping 8 hours of time. If a crpg was made around the vancian system, the whole game should be developed in a way that allows room for modeling those consequences, or alternatively restricting resting to predefined scripted opportunities. I agree with you there completely. Getting all of the possible consequences of an action that would exist in real life in to the game is to much work. That is why the designers should take small steps towards making the encounters and the story choice consequences more realistic. Not turn the other direction.

Don't you see that you're arguing against yourself here? Removing trash mobs makes Vancian mechanics less necessary. You're not going to run out of spells when there's no gauntlet of battles to go through to get to the boss, so you might as well have a full set every time. Removing trash mobs in an action crpg as PoE is impossible. Designing a game that is about 70 hours of gameplay with only meaningful story driven encounters would mean that the developers never finish the game. I therefore accept that trash mob will exist, the question is how do you want to handle the encounters. With a repetitive spell system with no care for preparation or a spell system that punishes you for not choosing the correct options in advance. I really don't understand what is so cool about empowering a spell. Am I supposed to be excited over that the fireball covered a radius of 6 meter instead of 3? Or that at the next 5 level ups my magic missiles will do 3 times more damage? or that the accuracy of my confusion spell is now +15? The fun thing about spellcasting is the variety of spells like teleportation, wish, summoning, petrification, jump, fly, featherfall etc. and that you have to prepare accordingly to the quest your venturing on. Not that the same spell combination can be repeated at higher levels for same effect. The world is more realistic when your characters are not allowed to rest between encounters without forfeiting the current quest, unless the quest builds up to a natural resting point. More constraints would make PoE engrossing not less. Death and losing the game should be possible. Making the mechanics so simple to navigate that almost anybody could finish the game increases its audience but diminishes its original appeal.

Hearing that the crowdfunding campaign of PoE2 had begun made me extremely excited. I went to the Fig page and signed up my pledge, eagerly awaiting the new stretch goals. Then a few days afterwards I read in the comment section that the spell casting will be implemented with a new empowerment feature. My first reaction to it was denial. Reading this forum has brought me out of that, but drained away all the giddiness I felt towards PoE2. I always play a wizard when I play a rpg, and I have never had more fun playing a spellcaster than I did in the IE games. In my opinion the right step is moving closer to a vancian system with more limitations. Not infinite magic missiles, so that the wizard can be used as a backup fighter. Since some of the inspiration for the empowerment system seems to be coming from Tyranny let's take it as an example. For most part of the combat I can let the AI control all of my characters and set it to use all abilities. The computer will do almost just as good a job at removing the trash mob as I would. I don’t have to care about which abilities that are used since I have an infinite use of them. Now the argument against this could be that the empowerment/mana only replenishes at rest, but why rest if all I'm getting is a few more missiles or larger area of effect. I never had much problem with getting rid of trash mobs (not even in PotD) in the first place and all this feature does is make your characters more capable of handling such mobs. If the choice was mine there would be almost no trash mobs, they make no sense character wise anyway. Trash mobs are boring and exist solely for the purpose of that the player can get more bang for his buck while decreasing the role playing aspects of the game. This is one of the reasons I'm strongly against removing the Vancian spellcasting system. If rest spamming is a problem, it can be solved in numerous ways, some excellent suggestions have already been mentioned above. This of course discourages casual gamers and those new to the genre, but it could be solved by for example adding a difficulty setting where every character has unlimited access to his special abilities. This post is getting to long, and even though there are other aspects of spellcasting I would like to discuss, I'm ending it here for now. Having been informed of the new spellcasting system I have reduced my pledge to just the digital version of the game from a collectors edition. P.S.: Sleeping in a dungeon is cheating, and if I was your DM none of the sleeping beauties would wake up from their magical dreams. Going back to an inn for sleep while exploring a cave would result in that cave being evacuated by the time you come back.