MadDemiurg

Yeah I mean new to Deadfire, I haven't played betas enough to distinguish between versions.

Intuitive +5 per +50% graze to hit +50% hit to crit Swift +5 dex +100% stride Immune to disengagement Considering the bottom 2 bottom bonuses of swift are kinda gimmicky it's pretty clear that Swift is UP and Intuitive is OP (seriously, what the hell are these %, 20% was considered good in PoE1). Swift being bad is also a big nerf to Wizards since DAoM was a big defining part of their kit and now it's not even worth the damage it does to you, lvl 1 fleet feet is like 2x better because of this. I think we need -recovery time or +action speed on swift, smth like 20-30% at least.

Conjured weapon scaling is new stuff, I tested it and you're right, it's not easy to notice as it jumps up in quality at certain thresholds rather than scaling gradually. I agree that the title is a bit exaggerated and sort of a clickbait :D. But DD casters are bottom tier now imo, if we exclude skald and ascended.

The spell balance is honestly terrible but if you cherry pick the good ones (i.e. the ones with duration more than 3 seconds) ascendant or chanter are the best CC classes. Ascendant has 20 sec charm/dominate/aoe charm + dominate which is basically the strongest affliction. All the while paralyze is nerfed to 6 sec because "omg mental binding OP". Wizard CC is better on average but has nothing to match 20 sec dominate and severely limited in resources. It's still decent, although confuse is nerfed into non entity.

Devoted (or any fighter really, main fighter strength comes from disciplined barrage, confident aim and stances available to all fighters, devoted is just bit better than the rest) is pretty good for multiclassing with high damage % bonus classes as it makes hitting and critting with this damage easier. 2h is pretty bad outside of ability use tho and even there dw is superior for the full attack abilities. With 2h your recovery in heavy armor is really bad, so I usually limit it to pikes and lighter armor. You can get some pretty impressive numbers but in reality the dps isn't great as your attacks are almost twice as slow compared to dw. The only exception is hunting bow with its -50% recovery modal which is awesome. TL;DR bleak walker/devoted with hunting bow or dualwielding spears or sabers would do better. 2h is in dire need of -recovery buffs to be viable.

Haven't tested so no idea. They worked on figurines PoE1 tho so I don't see why not.

Yeah, I don't like current armor system as well. Like at all. It also creates a huge mess in weapon balance. I would make armor translate into damage resist % using smth like logarithmic formula with effective armor being (armor - pen), with the assumption that pen will be wasted on low armor enemies that have armor < pen, but heavy armor would have values above max possible pen, meaning pen stacking would still give (diminishing) returns vs heavy armor.

I honestly woulnd't even waste 2 abilities to get +2 PEN on just FoD with pala. Cipher multiclass gives +1 PEN to all weapon attacks at the cost of 1 ability, that's way better. As far as pen goes, it's a threshold stat, you only need to have it match enemy armor, anything above is usually wasted. Well, you can hope that +1 pen would make you hit the +30% damage threshold as well but the chances are very slim. If you worry about high armor enemies, just carry a 2nd set of high pen weapons or weapons with pen modal. As far as my beta 3 experience goes, not being able to penetrate enemy armor is exceedingly rare.

Well, you're 1 PL behind due to multiclassing, so in a party pure ascendant is most likely better, with earlier high level power access and still getting +2PL from party buffs. For solo ascendant/stalker seems alright at least on paper tho. Survivability might be an issue. Ascendant/wizard might be fun if you burn all wizard spells on instant self buffs and you'll eventually get essential phantom to use your ectopsychic echo on.

Meh, there's way too many combos to even write down tiers. Also depends on how you judge them. Top dps without jumping through too many hops is probably smth like bleakwalker/soulblade dualwielding spears or smth and it's pretty sturdy too. Although smth like human bleak walker/street fighter would outdamage it with backstabs and when at low health. Still the most solo capable class is beckoner, optionally with paladin added for extra survivability. If you use full party it's honestly whatever, you can probably turn on AI and still stomp everything on PotD.

Do you think I don't know how damage calculation works? The following bonuses are effectively multiplicative with each other: +damage%, +lash%, -recovery (attack speed), +accuracy, +hit conversion, +crit dmg All of these are a lot easier to come by for weapons than for spells. Yes, weapon damage % mods are less effective than spell damage % mods but there are hardly any besides might. Thinking about it, they should add more damage passives for spells. Full party is kinda ez mode even on PotD unfortunately, but yeah you'll probably clear most fights w/o running out of steam later on. With the pletora of mods that can boost your weapon attacks they would be matching if not surpassing spell dmg at that point tho.

Idk, I'm a pretty experienced caster user in PoE1 and I liked them there from the beginning. I did TCS runs with a wizard and a priest. Most casters feel much weaker than they were in PoE1 and weapon builds feel a lot stronger, I never managed to hit the damage numbers I pull off with weapon builds now in PoE1 this early. Maybe the situation will change at higher levels with more spells available, but it could also get even worse if more passive damage multipliers for weapons become available. Anyways I can only judge the lvl 1-9 range in current beta. And I'm not saying that all caster builds suck, but most that try to dps with spells do. I did note the higher aoe alpha potential, but you fall off after that alpha extremely fast. E.g. pull + 2 fireballs is a huge chunk of your higher level slots in the current level range. Not to mention that many weapon builds also have huge single target alpha which might be more useful for taking out dangerous targets fast (but once they're out of their alpha strikes they still do plenty of damage with autoattacks). E.g. you can hit 5 guys for 60 with a fireball for 300 total damage, or you can oneshot someone with 150+.

If anything, certain multiclasses are still way OP. 2 ability points you miss from levelups you get as the starting abilities of your 2nd class usually. Some base character abilities such as sneak attack are also way more powerful than almost anything you could get with levelups in other classes. Plus you have the benefit of cherrypicking the best stuff from both classes, although in some cases you could be stuck picking from trash abilities due to slower power level gain. Same can happen with a single class that has "bad" power levels in terms of available abilities though. I'm pretty sure multiclasses don't need any buffs.

To an extent, yes, but this balance is skewed atm. a) The single target damage that weapon builds put out now is so much higher than the aoe caster damage that there's not much benefit to this aoe as single target allows you to focus targets faster b) Casters are severely limited in resources and run out of steam very fast, 2/eocounter per spell level doesn't cut it c) Even as far as aoe goes, a multiclass barb would put out a lot more aoe damage over the course of a fight. "Spell damage" wizard has better alpha but that's doesn't count for much. They could probably track this with stats, but they'll have to compare to optimized dps builds. The damage of an optimized and non optimized weapon build differs dramatically. Whereas there's not much to optimizing a caster. Compared to casual builds that don't optimize much casters should still do pretty well.

With the introduction of multiclassing the damage potential of weapon classes generally went up. Spell damage, due to the new per encounter system, was overall dropped. The number of spells you can use per fight was also decreased, but you don't have to rest to get them back now. As a result, I find spell damage builds severely underwhelming compared to weapon damage builds. E.g. I can do a nature godlike evoker with max might for maximized evocation damage and shoot a 100+ damage empowered fireball... 1/encounter, spending a per rest resource. Or a 60 damage one 2/enocunter. Whereas a minmaxed weapon damage build can be putting out better numbers with an autoattack. There are some exceptions like ascendant being able to spam powers and actually keep up in total damage at least. But overall "damage" wizards and druids feel really underwhelming now. Druids still make a decent healer and wizard works as a "weapon summoner" in a multiclass, at least for now when the lack of scaling on conjured weapons doesn't matter. But damage specs definitely need to be looked at. I'm not sure they are actually UP since they can do well enough on PotD so maybe it's weapons and weapon damage passives that need nerfing. But the current situation does not look balanced.

I don't see how your math works as multiclass will have power lvl 7 @ 20 and single class power lvl 9. So single class would get 7/9 ~= 77% of whatever variable modifier single class does, not less than 50% like in your example. It gets worse when you think that both would get a bunch of equivalent +power level boosts from other sources, and multiclass character potentially even more since he can cherrypick power level boosts from both classes if any.

The thing is, multiclasses are only 1-2 power levels behind, which is not that much, especially since there are effects that boost power level and I'm assuming there will be more of them. Allowing damage passives to scale with power level opens a whole new can of worms though since now it's possible to stack even more damage on top of what you already have with +power level boosts, that can even buff several multiplicative modifiers. We'll have characters hitting for 10k damage like in some Diablo clone pretty soon.

Well, 1% would be ok balance wise but the effect would be purely cosmetic then. My gripe with the current situation is that you still get full power passives from both classes if you multiclass, so it's possible to get sneak attack on top of carnage etc. This is probably solvable by giving all classes progressively more powerful passives with levelups so that single class characters get them faster (which is logical), but this is not the case currently for many classes and would result in overall powercreep. My another gripe is that with how easy the damage passives are to come by, spell damage builds are generally non competitive, bar a few exceptions. You can do more damage with a single autoattack swing than with a 2/encounter ability if you have a good build in most cases. Power levels don't look like a solution to this though. SA does get relatively weaker lategame as it's additive with other damage bonuses, including weapon qualify bonus, but +50% damage is still a lot no matter what stage you're at.

If sneak attack had +5% per power level that'd work fine if you did not also have deathblows. Start at +50% and scale to +85% for multi and +95% for single. Sounds fine to me. The issue would be if Deathblows was still available and it added an additional +50%. Now add a multiclass cipher to this which has biting whip for 85% SA AND let's say 65-75% biting whip. That's +150-160% damage from just 2 passives. This is waaay too much. +85-95% from a single passive is over the top as well. And who told you deathblows or equivalent won't be available at a higher level? Anyways, you can always find some other OP multipliers if you multiclass. Scaling % modifiers with level is a bad idea, but if they would go that route they honestly should nerf them heavily at lvl1, then it would at least be manageable. I don't think it's they way to go though.

Some of this stuff already scales though. E.g. sneak attack and carnage do a % of your damage so they scale with your damage. Let's say we give sneak attack +5% damage per power level. This would make it do +95% damage at power level 9, that's without stacking any +power level bonuses which you surely would. That would be beyond broken. Now let's say we nerfed it to 10% at lvl 1 to compensate. Now sneak attack (and rogues) sucks at low levels. There's no winning here. It would work if sneak attack was a fixed amount of damage like in DnD though. There's still a problem that some multiclass combos are able to stack ridiculous damage bonuses with no restrictions, but I seriously doubt power levels will solve this. I do agree that conjured weapons should scale in quality with power level though up to a certain cap. Currently you can get better regular weapons but not conjured weapons, so I assume they would fall off at high levels rather hard.

Ascendant is pretty strong, but there's a ton of builds in much more dire need of nerfs imo. With how many broken stuff there's currently in the game Ascendant probably only qualifies for "above average", at least with the current spell selection. Would likely get OP with amplified wave and such, although depends on how much they'll nerf it in PoE2.

I honestly think they should be buffed to +2. There are generalist talents that buff all weapon attacks or all spell attacks by +1. +1 to a specific element is.... limiting and not worth it. That been said, multi element attacks should benefit from only one of these bonuses.

A major balance concern to me is that a lot of abilities don't really scale with class power level, making multiclassing a no brainer and multiclass character weapon damage way over the top. "Power levels" have mostly worked out for damage spells, making these weaker when you multiclass even though ironically you can't stack that many bonuses to spell damage when multiclassing anyway. OTOH passives and weapon abilities like sneak attack/carnage/flames of devotion/soul whip etc don't really scale with class level and result in unbalanced characters swinging for 150+ damage level 6 with basic gear. Spell damage or single class weapon damage dealers (which seem more or less balanced in relation to each other) can't keep up. Something needs to be done about this, although simply scaling these abilities with class power level is a bad solution because: a) It will make them underwhelming at low level b) it will probably make them OP if you can stack a bunch of +power level bonuses on top Maybe certain passives just need to be weaker if you multiclass, idk. Another approach would be to rebalance everything to the same level of OPness adding some stronger higher level passives for the single class characters and adding more sources of stacking spell damage (currently it's mostly the rare +power level bonuses). Mobs would need to be buffed quite heavily in this case as well though. Yet another approach would be to tweak damage formula so that there are diminishing returns for stacking damage bonuses (you need to account for lashes too though).

Idk if it's new or not, I didn't play beta much before. You can check it out on tooltips, base summon duration is improved by int. Even if recovery stops phrases, considering you summon once in like 20 sec or so the impact is still very much negligible (You probably lose like 1.5 sec with dumped Dex).

With max Int you still can keep them up all the time in my experience (In fact, you can resummon them before they expire). Plus, extra cast time is fairly negligible for something you do only once in a while and you don't care about recovery at all (they are already summoned).