Climhazzard

I just confirmed that you can use swift strikes and Clarity of agony while spiritshifted as a shapeshifter.... and that the level cap in the Beta is level 9 (by console commands), which is apparently much to low to get the long pain while multi classed. EDIT: Also apparently the lash damage from the swift strikes upgrade works while spiritshifted too.

I just checked too... apparently I'm a little slow, lol. It doesn't work as cheese said. My control character was a barbarian though and I can confirm carnage does work.

My issue with it currently is athletics, which I feel is necessary for every character and prevents me from having enough active points to spend on active skills across my party. For example, the character that finds hidden stuff should also be able to disarm traps, but atheletics/sneak/mechanics is really spreading the points to thin. Not sure how if at all I would change it though, maybe change athletics to give a small bonus to stride or something (say 2-3% per point) instead of second wind. Then you'd just need it for your strikers.

Finished the beta and thought I'd post again with additional feedback. First, about combat speed. I'm sure by now there's enough feedback on it being to fast but I'll say it again. Characters move around the field very fast, leading to an extreme lack of tactical control of the battlefield. Suggestions: Whatever changes you make, please bring back slow combat option so I have the option to go even slower. Please also add a way to make characters stand their ground for improved tactical control. I almost feel like combat speed is bugged right now, like the game goes faster when combat starts... Related to combat speed, is attack/recovery speeds. I feel like this was going to be your solution to slow combat down. If you look at the numbers spells usually take around 6 seconds to cast/recover, two handed weapons are around 3.5 seconds.... then 1 handed weapons are at 1 second. What's with the huge disparity of one handed weapons? A dual wielder could cut a spell caster to shreds long before he ever casts a spell. Did they perhaps receive the wrong numbers for the beta build? If they did it will highly skew proper feedback. Penetration. It's bad. You have no idea if you're properly armored going into combat, might as well just go in naked. All builds focus around maintaining high penetration. Suggest reducing the value per point of penetration to something more gradual than a 70% loss in damage. For example 5% damage for each point of pen over enemy armor and minus 10% damage for each point of pen under enemy armor. Lack of grazing. This is huge for spell casters, it makes them even more useless than the long cast times. Perhaps some spells should be auto hit where a failed roll halves the effect. Or something else, idk, but right now offensive spell casting is bad. Melee fighters don't feel it so much but if one handed weapons are attacking to fast like I suggested earlier then that's partly why. Talents. I don't mind the loss of universal talents. Each class having unique talents makes multi classing more interesting. However certain classes don't even get passives and other classes get quite boring passives. Maybe open up your creativity cells here and add in more talents. For priests/wizards/druids I suggest ways of gaining concentration through passive procs and/or some way to effect spell recovery. Like a "negate recovery on next spell cast" sort of thing. In general I feel like you could solve some of the complaints about the current state of spell casting through passive talents. "Evocation spells now graze instead of miss" for example. Those are the main points. Balance is across the board at the moment but there are a lot of broken abilities and game mechanics that are effecting it to much to judge on a per class basis atm. Positive feedback. Multi classing, awesome. Sub classes, awesome. Animations, awesome. Detailed characters/armors, awesome. New inventory management, awesome. UI, very clean, awesome (but please give me a stand your ground button). That's all for now.

I finished the Beta with a Psyblade, who's focus fills up quite quickly. But I messed around with using Ascendant for that combination and imo it's basically terrible, you barely have time to even cast a spell after reaching max focus before it all drains back down to zero. Ended up going soul blade instead which was quite good (awesome) in combination with devoted.

FindGameData works, but GiveItem and GivePlayerMoney are giving me the message "The command or script is not available at this time".

Honestly I think that problem is significantly more common in the new system than it was in PoE. Set the game to pause when weapons are ineffective and you'll realize just how bad it is. Literally the game is always paused and you're constantly digging through the combat log to see who's attacking something they shouldn't be. But the weapons still do some damage when ineffective, unless the critter has a complete immunity, right? Complete immunties are in the game as well. And yes they will always do a minimum amount of damage, but if you look at the numbers it's literally no different than the minimum amount of damage you'd do against a highly armored opponent in PoE and much more common of a problem in the new system.

Honestly I think that problem is significantly more common in the new system than it was in PoE. Set the game to pause when weapons are ineffective and you'll realize just how bad it is. Literally the game is always paused and you're constantly digging through the combat log to see who's attacking something they shouldn't be.

I multiclassed a Devoted to a Monk. Turns out the penetration of his devoted weapon would be lower than the penetration of his fists if it wasn't for the devoted bonus, so fists seem to be perfectly in line with the normal weapons every non-devoted character needs to use: Fine Sword: Penetration 9 = 5 + 1 + 3 (Base + Fine + Devoted) Fists: Penetration 7 = 5 +2 (Base + Monk) Base is the same, and the Monk bonus is already higher than the Fine bonus from the weapon. Also, since Fists don't have a proficiency, they also don't get the penalty -10 acc from being devoted. Using fists and a devoted weapon for dual wielding (equip the weapon in the off-hand) can be great fun and makes for a good concept of someone who fights streetwise. 7 is honestly low for a single damage type, fine maces are 8 I think? I think 8 is honestly to low as well, but weapon users can benefit from going devoted (getting up to 11 with a modal that can reduce armor is good for most things I've encountered so far) while monks cannot so they're stuck at a penetration that's to low to be useful. Remember that if your pen is to low you do 70% less damage, that's huge, the benefits from going devoted at the moment are huge.

Is there a merchant somewhere that sells a decent amount of stuff so you would be able to equip hirelings once you cheat some copper? The dwarf at the pier doesn't even have any weapons and only a couple armors.

To me the current system is confusing. Offensively oriented affliction descriptions always refer to will, fortitude, and reflexes. Affliction defense descriptions always refer to stats; constitution, strength, etc. It should honestly be one or the other for both, not split between two different ways of describing everything. It's very unintuitive, from just reading spell and ability descriptions I honestly have no idea what abilities defend against or counter which other abilities.

Not quite following your reasoning here.. the Penalty to devout should be they can only properly use one weapon type, fists would be one weapon type, devout monk shouldn't be anymore OP than any other properly balanced devout combination and honestly with the current penetration system it feels like the only way fist monks would ever be a viable game option. (though currently there isn't much penalty period for picking Devout and they are not limited to one weapon type)

As far as I can tell both force of anguish (prone doesn't work) and torment's reach (no aoe) are both broken at the moment. Honestly even if they weren't broken I'm pretty sure the current monk is terrible at the moment compared to other options. Torment's reach was nerfed terribly hard, even if it wasn't broken I'm not sure how good monk would be at the moment because they suffer badly from the penetration system. Also, if we're forced to multi class to get a decent amount of talents to pick from then please provide a fists proficiency so I can multi class monk to devoted to get a decent amount of penetration with fists.

Combat resolves itself just as fast as it did in original Pillars, the only difference at the moment is spellcasters took a huge hit in usability. With current cast/attack time numbers I think movement speed needs to be slowed significantly to not only balance combat but also slow combat resolution to what I think you were hoping to accomplish. If slowing movement speed isn't the right option for some reason then please please bring back slow mode so I don't have to spend 75% of every combat with the game paused.

I honestly think it's pretty bad. There's such an incredible fall off in damage if you're lacking Pen that I think multi class devoted is going to be almost a requirement for any melee hoping to do damage. I messed around quite a bit with the first few fights and multi class devoted using blunt weapons (higher pen) or dual damage type weapons (swords for example) was the only way to do consistent damage. Right now I'm feeling a multi class devoted dual wielding mace user is going to be one of the only ways to do consistent damage. (hint: try devoted/cipher). Right now I feel like the system is a lot less intuitive and is more punishing than the system PoE used. If I were going to suggest a change that would make the system better without completely overhauling and rebalancing it then it would be to make the falloffs and gains for Pen/armor more gradual. For example... For each point of Pen over enemy armor rating gain 5% damage. For each point of Pen under enemy armor rating lose 10% damage.

Lots of thoughts here. To begin, I'm really disappointed that there's still no kind of stand your ground option like the older infinity engine rpg's had. It would be a vastly helpful option for tactical control. Would really really like an option for slower combat speed. I really hate the new penetration system. The one used in the first game was much better imo, I didn't have to spend have my time studying the combat log/mob info to figure out what I should and should not attack with each character. Also, immunities on top of the new penetration system is like poring salt in the wound, it really should just be one or the other. A huge cutoff in damage for being off 1 point of penetration is terrible. Also properly controlling incoming damage as a monk now is going to be virtually impossible if you don't have the penetration values of all the mobs in the game memorized.... Offensive affliction descriptions are always based on will, fortitude, and reflex, while descriptions for abilities that defend against afflictions are all based on attributes. It should be one or the other instead of both, its' very confusing and you have no idea what abilities counter or don't counter which afflicitons from reading their descriptions. Blunt weapon damage is seems to low? Mace/warhammer do considerably less than sword at the same attack/recovery speeds. EDIT: I just realized blunt weapons have higher base penetration. Character creation has a lot of issues, races don't show racial bonuses for example. The culture attribute bonus doesn't show up in character creation. Also I feel like you ought to be able to select it before you change attributes, or if not that then you should at least be able to switch between creation pages without hitting the next and previous buttons, same as you could in PoE. It would be nice if Cipher spell descriptions showed focus cost, mainly for the Soul Blade who has low focus. Quite a few abilities seem to be currently broken, torment's reach, force of anguish, and ancient memory, to name a few. Character progression took a dive from PoE 1, since all the non class abilities got rolled up into the various classes, most of your customization is done at character creation. Balance wise... Monk is a huge disappointment compared to PoE 1. Torment's reach has triple the cost for half the damage. And swift strikes doesn't put him on anywhere near the level of auto attack damage a devoted/cipher does... which may in itself be a bad outlier atm. Clarity of agony being wound based is a nice change though. Spells have a huge cast time/recovery penalty, don't really like it... your dual wield weapon expert can hit like a million times in the 10 seconds it takes a chanter to summon some mobs and recover. Something positive, I love the new character/armor details, and hair options. Well, that's all for now, I'll think of more later.

I'm personally expecting Troubadour to be the best multi class choice for a Paladin tank. Something like the 4th tier healing phrase would make you invincible, and if you want to deal damage you have options such as dragon thrashed, as a troubadour you could probably do both at once... but it all depends on what abilities will be available and what level they'll be available at.

Answer: This is going to be weird. I know the whole party contributed to dialogue checks but they also contribute to lock picking outside of dialogue. I guess this is one of those things that could make since from a game mechanic but seems weird on paper. if they want to make mechanics more useful and incentivise more characters taking it, allow users to drop more than one trap and then more characters may take it. You dont need to buddy up and hold each others hand while lockpicking. This kind of seems like the start of a bad joke to me... "How many _____ does it take to do _____?!"

Personally I think it's nice having some classes that aren't too item dependent. You can make a party of monks, mages, priests, and druids, then finish the game with only white items. Try doing that with fighters, rogues, barbarians, rangers, etc... possible, probably, but not nearly so easy. If you mix them up, you don't have to worry about getting the best magical weapons ASAP as you play through the game for every character, just a few. Besides weapons, casters have basically the strongest progression in the game anyways.

If you make staves have caster specific bonuses then my devoted monk wouldn't be able to weapon focus them... I suppose there could be 2 classes of stave, one for casters, one not, not to mention daggers, which might also commonly be consider a rogue weapon.

Solving the high damage problem making DR useless is fine, though I generally just valued the reflexes stat more for dragons than I usually would... But all they needed to do to fix that is convert the whole thing to percentages, having a strong fall off 1 point below a threshold is terrible imo. It is, as the person he was replying to was saying, going to be a no brainer to stay over that point. Hopefully they make the fall off more gradual, for example each point below = 10-15% less damage, each point above = 5% additional damage.

Don't like the sounds of the new damage resistance/armor penetration system at all. Literally 1 point of armor or penetration can increase or decrease your damage taken or received by 70%? Wow... that makes it a bit hard to finely control the amount of incoming damage my monk takes.... Anyways, the rest of this stuff looks great. Thanks for gathering it all in one place.

This is how I feel about it too. I don't really see any stat as dumpable myself, but it all depends on your build. The effects of any one stat might seem relatively minor, until you make a build that focuses on a stat. Like a high might moon godlike monk with veteran's recovery (the might increases your dmg and self healing from moon godlike and veteran's recov). As for might not making sense, I consider might something akin to spiritual power, able to make fighters stronger or wizards more powerful. Would be nice if scripted interactions reflected this a bit better, but I can live with physically strong wizards I guess, lol.

Eventually I'll play PoE 2 to death and really crave some more content, at that time I'll welcome a DLC expansion whole heartedly. I'd rather it didn't mess up the game progression like the PoE expansions did though. I'd welcome new classes, systems, etc, whatever they want to put in it as long as there's a healthy chunk of new content. The modern practice to nickle and dime customers through DLC purchases is literally one of the worst things to happen to gaming. It's not always nickles and dimes either, just check out the prices on DoA 5 costume sets.... lol. It generally puts any company doing it on my **** list, though it doesn't necessarily stop me from playing their games. "Free" to play games are the same except worse, and I refuse to play those anymore period.

I get the feeling the specialist wizard schools will actually end up being more desirable for multi classing than single classing. Many multi class wizard ideas will just want to use a few specific spells like Concelhaut's Staff and specializing in them will improve their scaling, somewhat negating the downside of multi classing. Single class wizards on the other would be losing out on utility if they specialize.