Voss

Eh. This isn't that hard to work out. We know the base pen of all weapons (at least for the Beta 4 versions). It largely ranges from 6-8, with a few outliers at 9 (like arquebus, stiletto, mace and estoc). A solid majority of weapons look to be 7 pen base. The armor piercing weapons of PoE1 are 9. Swords are 6 base, but multi-damage. Warhammers are also multidamage but 8 base pen. hunting bows are 6 pen, but hunting bows are multi damage (pierce/slash). Weapons and armor are pretty identifiable on kith (humanlike) models. if you wander into a fight with armor values of 6 or less, it's pretty much useless (without a handful of class abilities), even to weapons with no special qualities (including fine). if you're facing ranged weapons with scale mail on, they're going to pincushion you. So... Hide, AR 5, 3 vs slash. Universally useless. Swords and daggers start out overpenning this crap, and you take +20% recovery for wearing it. Leather, 5, 3 vs crush. Again, useless. (And still +20%) Padded, 5, 3 vs pierce. Again. Still +20% breastplate: AR 7, 5 vs slash. +35% recovery, bad vs... almost anything. The lower slashing value makes it effectively useless against the few things with lower pen. scale, AR 7, 5 vs piece, +35%. Largely bad. Equally bad vs the low pen swords and hunting bows. Medium is weird. If you're a barbarian, paladin, Unbroken or Wizard, you can make it work, If you're not, you're either DR=Pen for most weapons, bad vs swords and most ranged weapons OR sabres, or up against an armor piercing weapon that will ignore it. Brigadine, AR9, 5 vs pierce. Actually good against many weapons, with a big weakness (which is fine), +55% recovery. Ouch Plate, 9, 5 vs crush. +55% recovery. (anyone seeing the theme yet? There are essentially three armor types with variants for weaknesses. Warhammers, by the way, are really good. At the same quality level, they get past AR of -everything-. As pierce/crush, they get to bypass both heavy armors, and they're innately superior to medium armors. Swords (and greatswords) are fine against everything but plate. Robes and clothes are AR3. Basically unless you run into dogs or something with exceptionally low pen (2-4), all light and most medium armors are useless. Against people with weapons? Feh. There are a couple specific matchups where you aren't hosed if quality levels are equal. if they've brought ranged weapons of any kind, you must have plate, as brigadines are useless against basic piercing weapons. Deflection min/maxing seems far more important than any kind of armor. From the player's side, the problems really only start when you run into critters with immunities to specific damage types. And to a lesser extent, critters that just get better than plate mail values for reasons. The only way past this system is if the player gets armor quality increases before enemy weapon qualities increase, or they exclusively single class (or multiclass with) classes/subclasses that get AR increases. tl;dr : If the current values stay from beta 4 into the final version, the AR/Pen system is extraordinarily bad, and should have been reverted to PoE1 like the might/strength/resolve thing

True, those durations are long enough. Eyestrike has a problem with getting it off in melee (especially against creatures with interrupts) just because of the cast time.

Well, by multiclassing into swashbuckler, he's going to be losing some survivability, so I'm just wondering if there are any rogue abilities that would benefit a tank and make up for the loss of hp in general. Lots. Persistent distraction is great for a tank. Bonus engagement and passive perception debuff to everyone engaged. Riposte is also helpful for keeping attacks up, and blinding and hobbling people are useful as well. Losing a point of health per level seems negligible at best. Though some of these abilities take a while to come online.

One of the big problems with cypher \rogue (and most spellcaster\rogue combos) is recovery time vs duration. Mental binding, for example, lasts 6 seconds and the recovery time is 3 seconds (plus armor penalty). By the time you can attack the paralyzed enemy to get the sneak attack bonus, half (or more) of the duration is gone. By contrast rogue abilities can last 15 seconds or more and depending on weapon, much shorter activation and recovery times, so a lot more sneak attack damage can be applied. As a general rule (there are exceptions, like wizard for defensive buffs) rogues and debuff spellcasters need to be separate people in the party. There are great synergies, but to truly take advantage the caster and striker need to be on different timers.

Actually, the current deadzone seems to be light armor existing at all. Unless you're stacking DR from various class bonuses\abilities, everything pens. So wearing light armor involves taking a recovery penalty for no reason. At the same time, most recovery times are so horrid (in beta4), that wearing heavy armor means being unable to accomplish much of anything. (Seriously, six to seven second recovery times are awful) It's a very weird system, where assassins want the biggest thing they can find and protecting yourself (with gear) limits your utility. I suspect one of the best 'tanks' in the game will be a wizard\rogue. Riposte, persistent distraction and a suite of buff spells.

My biggest issue with the way they did turn timers is it took players 'up' a gamer layer. Instead of focusing on tactical control of a squad, it became about moving pieces to unlock the -players- ability to click on a series of boxes to delay a count. The gamist element takes precedence and the narrative element is.... pretty irrelevant. That's pretty backwards to me. A mechanic should involve more investment in the game's setting, not push the player out. And then there is the problem with map generation and stupid tactics. All to get {thing} that everyone needs but also want to blow up.

Hopefully the spoilers will be easier to avoid than for Infinity War.Considering I've seen zero IW spoilers, how hard could it be?

Xcom2 is an odd example, at least to me. I couldn't pinpoint a specific reason for it, but I tried it and -didn't- have fun. I can think of several reasons that contributed (bugs that carried over unfixed from the first one, the proliferation of timers, the plot and al it's terrible cliches, etc, etc) but the game suffered from a lack of fun, not that I decided it wouldn't be fun in advance. I had actually been quite looking forward to it. Perhaps interestingly, I found that the youtubers and such I watch were really enthusiastic about xcom2 (to the point of liberally spraying their enthusiasm all over the screen) disappointed (and whiny) about ME: Andromeda, and in both cases I had a WTF reaction... Usually they have similar tastes to mine (which is why I watch them, as they're likely to cover games I'm interested in)

They're talking about the linger/duration of the damage shield. With high enough Int you can theoretically (or with the beta, possibly testably true) have shields that last long enough that one is activate 'under' another. So when the first pops, the nextis already ready.

Personally, I'm leaning towards shattered pillars trickster and finding as many possible ways of spamming attacks- two weapon style, swift strikes (swift flurry+ dirty fighting+stunning blow), trickster defense buff+ persistent distraction+ riposte, rooting pain, etc. That all the rogue attacks are full attacks is a major bonus for a two weapon user. Add in alchemy and a lot of potion\poison use (really going to push myself to use consumables). Going to try to focus on daggers over fists, but we will see how that goes.

I get that there are still some advantages. It being reactive and recovery free is nice. However,just off the top of my head, it is still: 1:) The only wizard subclass ability that does something that is not unique 2:) The only wizard subclass ability that can be easily replicated by a spell (at the same tier or others) and I'd argue extremely likely to be so. A show of hands everyone that is going to cast, or depend upon, mirror image over displaced image in PoTd or harder fights in hard when getting mob'd. 3:) Does not benefit from empower (enchantment has the same issue but to my knowledge there isn't an ability that straight up frees you from a dex affliction so it doesn't suffer from 1 and 2, at least) Some other issues but those look to be the most glaring. 1) Well... Form of the Fearsome Brute (transmuter) appears to be a potion in Beta4. So that can be handed around to anyone 2) Eh. There are a lot of subclasses that aren't PotD material. Barring some weird changes or unexpected interactions, I don't see a lot of people leaping to mage slayers or black jackets either. Compared to Kind Wayfarers and Bleak Walkers, the other paladin types seem to be 'yeah those also exist,' and are innately good for being paladins, but not the subclass benefits (though someone may well contradict me on that) 3) Can't really speak to this- don't know how empower interacts with any of the subclass abilities.

Nope. Anyway, dead and feral kids aside, the Dyrwood was pretty full of GrimDerp. Any average citizen was likely to be 1) involved in religious persecution, 2)anti-intellectual and/or 3) a racist bigot (both in terms of other species and other cultures), and of course the player's... quarry, for lack of a better term PoE1 made BG2's beginning seem downright cheerful. Every new significant area is largely another layer of horrible, and it generally isn't 'evils to fight in a heroic idiom' kind of horrible. More institutionalized normality of badness that Joe Average Dyrwoodan (as laid out by Eder, Mr. Number Nineteen) just hang around and wait for it to happen to them. And the natives and the ancients aren't any better (actually worse, once you delve into their background and Red Sands) Honestly though, the beta content doesn't strike me as Deadfire being particularly lighter in tone. Polynesian caricatures aside, what's going on is fairly horrible and exploitative, in a very classic-cliche style for the Age of Sail. With bonus fantasy soul atrocities.

I think the big difference is bg1->2 involved adding a handful of things, like subclasses and higher levels. PoE1->2 involves complete reworks of entire subsystems (armor, particularly), and a lot of timing and resource changes, and a great deal of tinkering that the BG series didn't have, since it had to stay 2nd edition AD&D. That isn't necessarily a BAD thing for Deadfire, but it is a significantly different process for the sequel. Some very important thing are effectively starting from scratch in terms of development.

Wizards don't need the bonus spells. They've got grimoires. The wizard subclasses are... uninspiring and restrictive, but more spells is a bad (and fairly redundant) approach.

Why does berserker seem a poor fit? The bonuses should apply, and help the shifted forms hit harder and have more DR. Mage slayer seems very bad- from the way people have talked about it (and videos), mage slayer decreases the duration of everything, including barbarian abilities and probably shapeshift. Corpse eater seems... thematically interesting but impractical. The eating and recovery time seems problematic.

Your feelings are one thing (and honestly no ones concern but yours), but the arguments you're presenting are pretty much exactly the opposite of how the system changes actually work.

This sword says sexy things back. Ugh. Before or after its created gore spattered holes in people?Very creepy.

I thought it was a board friendly iteration of 'Get f...d!'

Yes. It's more balanced because the encounter output is predictable for every class. Old system involves hoarding combat resources for spellcasters, dumping it all at once for important fights, then resting to get it all back. There isn't even a pretence of balance under that system.

Quick superman? Or are we not talking about Clark Kent? Either way, relevance is what?

No, that's a premise. Logic would involve a proof of the concept, not merely a decree.

What's the appeal of the talking sword? I take great comfort in the fact that none of my tools\toys talk back.

Yeah, I don't think much of her or her 'quest' for this reason. She's a woman without agency. She takes a stranger she just met (who may or may not have murdered her countryman) to her ambassador, gets shirty if said stranger didn't intervene on her behalf with the local representative about an issue they knew nothing about. And expects the stranger to give her permission to break an already arranged treaty because... she personally doesn't like it very much. And this can happen in the space of a day or so, or an extended period of time where she gets to watch said stranger make all sorts of questionable decisions. Its unclear why this is a companion quest at all, let alone the pretence that she's making a decision. She's just deferring to the player, in a way that seems like she's looking for an excuse to avoid the responsibility of making the decision herself.

Depends what they are. At this point they're nice in theory, but may well not be cost effective. Just like the PoE1 Cipher- for a long time it was worth sticking with the low level paralyze and simply recasting it, as the higher level stuff wasn't cost effective.

Depends what they are. At this point they're nice in theory, but may well not be cost effective. Just like the PoE1 Cipher- for a long time it was worth sticking with the low level paralyze and simply recasting it, as the higher level stuff wasn't cost effective.