transfett

you are correct points of power is not the same as power level. 3 power levels equal about 6 levels

In the current system empower gives 3 points of power. When you level up you get +3 points to your levelled class and +1 point for your other class.

Oh, even worse than before! Nah, it just means that everyone will have more spells within each single fight, and that in turn will improve encounter design

The appeal of exploration is finding the unexpected. In a shooter you have the legendary vent. In Fantasy-RPG it is the cave behind a waterfall. In isometric games you can have the hidden lever, a teteleporter you accidentally assemble and the obvious,locked door whose key can be found if you are attentive and sharp-witted. These are map-within-map approaches. BG1 gave the player many side-by-side-maps with infrequent content. I do not prefer the latter for two reasons: First creating maps is a very costly part of development. You'd be advised to pack them full. Secondly when you walk out of a forest, most of the time you'll expect another forest to appear. The map-in-map-approach usually allows the developer to stray farther away from previous content and art. Filling up similar maps with varied content is just as possible but requires more ingenuity.

That thing with "Craft your own stuff! Have full control over everything" is a newcomb's paradox: The more omnipotence a system claims to offer, the more predictable choices are implemented. Alternatively you can make a game that does not care about balance and wants you to find the most abstruse ways to slay opponents. That's basically magicka. You think you want to modify your spells but in the end, it is just concentrated genericism. I think everything exciting about spellcrafting is to find something handcrafted in there and exactly not its modularity.

On the power curve PoE 1 already ends etching at the end of midgame-tier. I did not play TWM yet but nothing beats Gaze of the Adragan in terms of power. With TWM part 2 we will very probably penetrate the "we either invent some really crazy stuff or reiterate what we already have but with bigger numbers"-barrier. That's why I would like to start at low levels again, with a different set of magic and different pacing.

I think that, for PoE2, class design could be a bit more fundamentally changed. Like: Wizards and Priests have their spells reduced to maximum of 4 per rest. Spell duration and strength are increased. Every Grimoire in the game grants Wizards 1 or 2 predefined, unchangable per-encounter spells (depending on Grimoire level and the spells themselves). Similarly, Priests might get a choice of per-encounter spells upon certain level-ups depending on their faith. I do not have an idea for Druids. They could keep their system as is. What I hope these changes will do, is that micromanagement will be reduced and the decisiveness of damage spells increased. Crowd control will not be buffed, still stay relevant but more comparable to other spells. Attributes will have more impact as well.

In D:OS you get items with randomly rolled stats depending on item level and item tier. I do not think that this kind of loot would be helpful to PoE. When you play the game for the first time, you do not know which items you will find either way. This game just lacks variety in the bonuses items grant you. It is all modular and does not really differ from what you could find if it was procedurally created. The true difference is that in D:OS you had many more different bonuses for each different kind of item you might get rolled, so you were really happy if you got what "perfectly suits you and the other stuff you already have". I would like many items with active abilities or situational passives. Something like a spear that prevents healing and resurrection or a shield that taunts beetles and spiders. These soulbound weapons sound like some EA treatment. Overpowered stuff for Nerds with Inferiority Complex. Having everything you wanted. No thought and choice required. EDIT: Yes instadeath mechanics is - if implemented at all- for highest tier items and can change the difficulty of encounters in mind-numbing randomness.

Dumping constitution works because of 2 reasons: 1. you get dps from it (because you get more might/dexterity and now perception) 2. you get away with it As long as dumping con works, dumping con+wearing no armor will be the way to go. dumpng con + wearing armor will become worse. What we need is a universal reason not to skip con, which is both a harsh health penalty and more AoE damage and group swarming. What happens with armor recovery penalty then is free to creativity. What if 1 point in constitution also gave 20% health multiplier? That way leaving con on 3 would result in a measle 160% health on wizards and priests, 260% on druids,chanters, ciphers and rogues.

I have little expertise in how a game uses computer resources. On my Vista Skyrim runs "relatively" smooth. PoE works until you get to Gilded Vale, which cannot be loaded because I do not have more than 3 GB. It think it has something to do with the different camera movement. In Skyrim textures can be loaded dynamically in different qualities whereas in PoE your camera might jump over any distance any moment.

After reading through my comment I recognized you might find the following lines offensive. Also, I exaggerate and aggravate because I cannot find the definite positive impact you promise with your suggestions. Please do not take offense. Remember that PoE is an isometric game where you can not actually walk up to someone and tip his shoulders. Your proposal to make Persons have daily routine requires lots of extra work. You need bigger or more maps where there is enough free space, so the species can freely rotate between those places. You need to rework the managment of the time dimension so, like in the witcher, you actually have any sense of time. (e.g. you cannot even see where the sun is) Once the work is finished, what is the benefit of all this? The maps are overdimensioned, travelling time and loading screens have doubled. There are dummy npcs everywhere and you keep trying to put them apart from each other until you find the one you have been looking for. He then tells you, he does not have time and you should come back later (whatever...). You now decide to kill Raedric (which you did not visit yet), only to find out after two days of travel in actual in-game time, that he is on vacation in the Valian Republics and won't come back until in two months (At this point I cannot think of anything that would actually convince me there is some "life" going on). Even if you plan to ambush someone in his daily routine (some scenario I just made up), this plan fails at even gathering the necessary information. Then you do not know how long it will take him. Not to mention 99% of players are not patient enough for this. In most cases it might heavily screw over encounters. In case of wilderness areas: I think it would just pump up the maps. They consume lots of RAM and take a long time to be made ready for release (they already have been obsidians most tedious, time-consuming part of game development). tl;dr this game is based on maps and not open-world Regarding companion deaths: This is an experiance that most players harshly avoid. I dare to say not even one single player seriously intends to go through that. Yet you have a really nice idea and the game lacks responsiveness of that kind exactly. Your last point is a cool idea and would definitely flavour the game.

In PoE there is less comic relief and the setting is less magical. Both games have been about equally dark, it is just that BG mixed dark themes with humour. If I remember correctly, there was a quest the following way: you find a thug pissing his pants from a little child which you identify as ghost. she was murdered by that man. You get slapped by the dark side of the human soul, yet this situation could as well be animated slapstick. This recurring subliminal parody creates distance between you and the world. A magical circus where everyone is masked and gets torn apart by shadows? Funny, 'cause that ain't reality. Remember Jan Jensen? The talkative gnome who tells you he smuggled apes? The parody is, he is not a lonely, lonely sad man who just wants to get attention. He actually has friends. A beautiful elf tells a story about getting putrid infection and amputation. This story is sooo sad. Unfortuntely attention-whoring activates emotional defence. Normally you should feel now bored or angry, if anything. I for now do not want BG back. PoE does well story-wise. Edit: As for BG1: A lot of enemies were of unknown moral. I did not get through all but most of what I saw was depersonalized environment. Or Bandit-likes incognitos.

Other games were designed to be extended into multiplayer... multiplayer at barely 40% of the game's soul. Now considering how PoE has shaped and the unsuspiciously benevolent wording of the OP, I consider this a rival's try pouring poison into our single player experience.

Unfortunately "more VA" might be misunderstood. The irony is, at fixed development budget, more VA means less dialogue. That is one reason most of us actually supported the game - lack of voice actíng. So to be clear, if I say I want more voice acting, I mean more voice acting at strategic, meaningful points of dialogue and that this dialogue has been designed to benefit from voice acting (which in most cases is not just reading out loud). Thinking about it, what we might want is more use of ambient sounds: wind blowing through trees, creaking doors,screaming/weeping coming out of a cellar, simple background themes like the white shark theme, etc.

That gods have been created does not pose a real difference in itself. they are unimaginably powerful without a doubt. It is when people realize that 'a god' is a machine and you can bend this machine over your knees and open it up with a screwdriver. This puts the pantheon way below humans. Down to a point where every Earl of five trees thinks he can reign superior over the world. Now imagine a mob clubbing each other over a gun with infinite ammo.

PotD triple crown solo is for the challenge, not default game mode. So please do not overdo it with suggestions that change what the game is meant to be.

iirc crits increase dmg by 0.25 and dmg multipliers all add up resulting in 67.5 dmg.

Pillars of Eternity was a game that I have been looking up to, once I heard about its kickstarter campaign. Funding being already over, I frequently watched your blog and I believed that the money you received was well and responsibly handled, so I preordered this game. To sum up my impressions, it did a great job regarding its premise: IE game feel. I love the writing that includes lots of descriptions, whether it stands for itself or refers to the dialogue. The characters are well designed and some moments are exceptionally vivid (Durance: "This is YOUR trial and not mine."). The scripted interactions combined with their drawings is a huge improvement to these cheap and absurd looking "cinematics" that have been around for a while. I never assumed I was a graphics whore but walking within those paintings for me is one of the best gaming experiences since a long long time ago. At the same time that one of the selling points, little voice acting, did not live up to its expectations. Not that it would have hampered my immersion. It is that there is not as much more dialogue as I expected it to be. As others mentioned your race-class-heritage-profession does not invoke responses or different paths. at least for my bleach-elf-smuggler-monk-merchant-from-Archipel (which is a kinda ridiculous combo) who did not have a belief (paladin order/god) that would have gained him (enough) conversation options. Then I agree to the OP about combat and hard counters. With the current lack of hard mechanics, there is nothing you actually need. Contrary to the idea behind resting, there is no "correct" decision to be made. The only exceptions when you die or (additionally) you are confronted with too many enemies. Even then it is just that you avoid the wrong decision to do nothing. Instead you cc and make use of fireballs. Not one or two. It is necessary to throw in 3 to 5 until at least some foes are dead. Single target damage spells are useless. On the one handside they do not look like they do more damage in any way nor does the DR matter so much you cannot just add one more spell for the same effect. It does not warrant for the consideration 30 damage on one target or 20 on everyone? (my main monk needs to take damage so its even more of a nobrainer). On the other handside why would you even need single target damage? You need two or three characters to deal considerable damage (+flanking+direct/indirect buffs and the fact buffs are aoe) (did not try rogue yet). Is it then worth breaking engagement? (actually it should not be, because if that is necessary you made a mistake or the encounter is designed that way) WIth the current encounter design often there is no important target. Yes druids/mages and maybe ciphers, once I found an arquebus hunter to deal more damage than everyone else, but that was neither easy to find out (I had to kill everyone exept for that hunter) nor is it a problem to do an encounter just by how enemies run into your sword. Although I am exaggerating at this point. It is annoying not to kill xaurip priests first. I always kill siummoners first. And my party is heavily overleveled. i just do not see any objective other than decimation, which might be my own fault. Also: in combat I have no idea what is happening. People stand around and it is until I watch their status report I have no clue they are confused, shocked and petrified. Then I look up which spells my priests help prevent that. The small descriptions dont suffice, so rightclick. Then for a how-to-save-crosscheck I do not have a druid in my party. Suggestions: Give your story writers more freedom, both in creating content as well as criticising each other as to "both solutions resemble your own personality too much" or "we had design promises and your area/character lacks X/Y/Z" Make content not every player is supposed to find: treasures, riddles, dialogue and whole quests; It is not inefficient game design (but not top priority either.) Make combats more responsive: less waging one resource against the other, more correct and incorrect choices Add a journal reference to spells your party members learned so you can actually look up the spell icons without that specific class in your party (which even then is tedious) Design more spells in regards of rewards that exclude each other: One-at-a-time-single-target-prebuffs, AoE vs Single target; and the priests' withdraw is a great spell Dehomogenize encounters: Combine more monster variations within single encounters, with greater differences in strengths and weaknesses as of now (despite classes) For an owl like me: add a battle log category with fewer updates which pop up when you click (like. adragan cast thunderstorm -(click)-> thunderstorm dealt x damage---thunderstorm dealt....) Add "overacting" for disables. knockdown can be recognized immediately, when shocked, characters might kneel down in agony and petrified units turn white entirely

I am not a Beta player, but looking at the wiki, Druids seem to be casters that can shapeshift because lore. Druids could be a sandbox-like class if they chose their spells. That way Druids might choose utility that is not very effective if they do not specialize in said utility, thinking it is still better than being reduced to a single purpose. Example: Some "Fear" spell puts fear counters on target enemy, who is paralyzed until fear counters run out. The bear has means to put more fear counters on enemies, so have few other spells. Druids as a whole class were overpowered that way, but each single one on his own balanced.