Climhazzard

I'm a bit biased because of the original penetration system in beta, which is why I stick to weapons with at least two damage types. But even with a less harsh penetration system there are still immunities to contend with so a weapon with two damage types still doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. Without knowing what kind of weapons I'll find in game my first choice is dual wielding longswords.

What's the best choice for Devoted right now? Soul Blade? I'm going to avoid the nature godlike monk until future playthroughs I think and go devoted (longsword) for my first playthrough. I'm assuming fists never made it to the weapon focus picks.

Is that a Nature Godlike I spy? lol. I hope that was some kind of finishing move, otherwise it didn't take long at all to break the game... May that tiger forever rest in pieces.

My party of default mercs got destroyed by 2 or 3 greater desert blights on normal difficulty, lol. They're way scarier than the Titan himself.

It's not fun. Your choices are basically miss 50 times until you die, or charge forward until you die. If someone knows how to win I'd like to know....

I have to wholeheartedly agree on mechanic changes from PoE. DR was much better than the current penetration system, and the overall feel and speed of combat was perfect, though fast weapons could have been buffed a bit. Now spellcasting speed is terrible and patch reactions seem to be to make everything else just as slow. PoE didn't really get great until maybe version 3.0. If you'd stuck with the lessons you learned, PoE 2 1.0 might have been pretty balanced and fun, but right now I'm feeling like I'll have to wait for version 3.0 for the best experience again. Well, here's hoping I'm wrong.

Unarmed are bugged in that after a save/load you lose the benefits of being a Monk and the damage drops to nothing. It also doesn't help that you can't mouse over your fists and see the attack speed and recovery like you can with everything else. I think fists are as fast as fast weapons but have no idea what their base damage is or how it compares to weapons. A level 6 monk and multi class monk fists have the same damage as a fine one handed sword with attack and recovery times of fast weapons. I'm guessing, at least before your first load, they're probably the top tier weapon right now. Minus the fact you'll be missing out on cool enchantments or whatever, so basically they're similar to what they were in PoE, but better with power level bonuses like that of nature godlike. I imagine the benefits of power level bonuses will taper off as power levels get higher overall though.

That's really cool... I wonder if it's intended, it's like having the benefits of two weapon sets in one slot, minus a bit of pistol alpha.

Highly agree with this. Some of them might be ok, like deflection malus.. but others are terrible, like 100% recovery malus. Take mace for example, the effect is pretty nice, but you could easily give yourself a longer recovery than the duration of the effect, lol.

If you go by the damage tiers it seems like penetration is valued more highly than other bonuses. I'm not a math wiz who knows if that should be true or not, so I won't comment on it. What I find odd is that penetration weapons are basically 3rd tier damage while dual damage weapons are first tier damage, but in a way their bonuses do the same thing. Dual damage might not be as effective at penetration but it's still better than single damage weapons, yet it has the highest base damage. I was wondering on people's thoughts about the best weapon choices for a Devoted if and when they make it so a Devoted can only pick a single weapon type? I was honestly thinking dual damage weapons to avoid immunities and have a fairly good chance to always be able to penetrate your opponent's armor with a good base damage. Dual swords is my current top pick.

I noticed they gave him some resistances but his HP is still to low imo.

Think I'm starting to get it figured out... this is pretty beast anyways. I couldn't find a target option to program interrupts, should be something like "Target: casting long cast time spell". I'm hoping we eventually get to customize auto attack behaviours too. Stuff like targeting enemies with the lowest deflection or armor first, or enemy mages, etc. Oh also, what does action set delay do? If I set it equal to the duration of one of these abilities would "always true" work? Guess I'll check tomorrow.

Torment's is 100% better once you upgrade it. And I personally feel the prone nerf killed force of anguish, rooting pain is a 10x better interrupt anyways.

Lightning strikes isn't bugged by the way. It pretty much takes care of the low level penetration issue by itself considering the damage isn't resisted by armor.

Off all things, I've been playing FF12 lately, which uses a similar system and might make for good comparison. I've only messed around with it a little bit so far but I honestly couldn't really figure out how to make my character keep an ability active (swift strikes and disciplined barrage) while still attacking enemies aggressively. I suspect that the "aggressive" auto attack AI got messed up with this patch because it wasn't working very well even with no other AI settings enabled. I'll mess around more with the AI more tonight and see if I can get things to work in order to provide some more feedback.

If you're worried about low level monk penetration, which is certainly an issue though you don't really have to use fists exclusively so I'm not sure it really is, you can go nature godlike. Low level Monk benefits a lot from power level boosts to transcendent suffering. About shattered pillar. We can't really rate the downside of their max wounds pool before knowing what benefit later abilities will give us from wounds. However right now shattered pillar is the best monk for generating wounds so as long as you're spending them quickly you'll be using more total wounds than other monks with higher wound caps. Also the ability to generate wounds when you hit instead of when you get hit makes rooting pain a lot better. If we do eventually get abilities that give defensive bonuses from wounds such as the one in PoE, then shattered pillar builds will just be the more offensive monk builds since they're better at steadily generating/spending wounds and don't need to be the center of attention to generate them.

I don't know to much about game development... but just from looking at the amount of bugs in the beta and considering the length of time it's taking for the next build to be released, I feel march is to optimistic for a release date.

Some that I feel need adjusting... Mage Slayer: The beneficial spell duration malus is way to harsh. Ascendant: The duration you get a power bonus at max focus is shorter than the cast time of some of your spells, lol.... Ghost Heart: I feel like the pet should be zero cast time/recovery and longer duration. Well... there's others I kind of feel like commenting on, like all the rogue sub classes, but for now I'll leave it at these 3.

I'll concede Island Aumaua are even worse than humans, lol. Though for all we know the zone the final boss is in could be a slog zone! Though I doubt that, lol. It's unfortunate they had to make way for the Blackjacks.

The human racial didn't exactly get better either, and it wasn't even good to begin with. I would have taken one of the new resistance traits over something that requires me to be half dead to activate, or preferably the nature godlike trait. I just want to play humans and not feel underwhelmed by the racial, lol.

Monk abilities probably work with the long pain like they did in PoE, though I haven't confirmed that yet. So you wouldn't really need overbear shot since you'd have raised torment and force of anguish. Oh so you mean u can stun enemies from long distance with long pain? Mmm that sounds OP... In PoE you could do that yes. But for all I know they removed the capability to do so since with shattered pillar it'd be easier to gain wounds.

Monk abilities probably work with the long pain like they did in PoE, though I haven't confirmed that yet. So you wouldn't really need overbear shot since you'd have raised torment and force of anguish.

Besides withdraw I found it really difficult to find any decent tier 2 priest spells tbh, and the 10 second duration was definitely the reason I skipped holy meditation. Another thing I noticed among priest spells were quite a few weak single target buffs with a 6 second cast time. Why in the world would I ever take one of those over something that has a decent aoe and duration like blessing, dire blessing, devotions for the faithful, etc?

Hunting bow has 3x the range. The accuracy malus on rapid shot is amazing though, amazingly bad. I feel like the malus on every modal needs rebalancing tbh.

I think putting it on perception is a good change, especially since it doesn't just include traps, but also hidden things. And honestly it'd be hard to convince me that out of 5 characters you couldn't have decent perception on at least one. All kinds of builds benefit from good perception, for some builds, like CC/debuffers, perception is the king of stats.