Tigranes

I disagree. A lightly armoured monk may not always be ideal, but he is viable. Zahua is currently running in hide armour in White March in a party, and though he will definitely die when things go bad, he remains an effective damage dealer that doesn't require constant babysitting. I was also able to go naked with my monk quite a lot of the time in TCS, though you always did need a plate armour in the pack. Monks, with the right attributes, equipment, and then the +Defence talent, especially the +9 Deflection equipment and a Paladin or Priest in the party, can have enough defences to survive most battles without cowering in the corner. If you're doing the wounds/tormented reach juggle, they're also able to turn a sticky situation (10 wounds easily in an instant in WM) to a quick dispatch of the enemies. They're especially fine with the Second Chance ring, as they can get right back up and fire away hundreds of damage against ill-armoured enemies before they can respond. In later levels, Iron Wheel + Tormented Reach is still a good combination, because again, in WM, a single high damage attack can rack 5 or even 10 wounds on a monk, so you're effectively sporting a temporary DR bonus equivalent to chain mail. If you play your cards right, you're either carrying wounds and the DR, or you're slamming your enemies faster than they can blink.

Call me crazy, but people probably don't work for months to make something in their product boring on purpose. rope kid is Sawyer.

Couple of things on your last 2 Qs: Accuracy is perhaps the single most important number out of the lot, so yes it matters. You don't necessarily need 18 perception for everybody, though. It depends on what you want from each character, because each class will also have different base accuracy values that you might feel is enough or needs a top-up for what you want them to do. Each class benefits the same from attribute gain, and the gain for each point of any attribute is clearly stated in the level up screen and character screen. How useful that is for you is a different matter.

No idea, but sounds like the game thinks White March isn't installed or something. Can you give more detail? Are you on Steam? Can you still go to White March areas and do quests and such?

Game looks pretty damn flashy to me. It's about the art style, not the number of pixels. But certainly it should be a goal to allow party members to split up and enter/exit small dwellings, just like you could do with IE from at least BG2 onwards. POE built on Onyx, Obsidian's in-house engine, would have been better in a huge number of ways, but the middleware costs were prohibitive for a Kickstarter budget (which is a pittance in the game world).

Depends on how hard you thought Normal is. I'd say POTD is great for challenging you to play more tactically.

They specifically wanted to get rid of the latter in POE2. I don't know about the former but I would really hope so.

Well, then do whatever you want im gonna still use per encounter spells even if i have to use a mod to achieve it OK, have fun. Nobody else ever cared about that, you know. Sounds like a case of "the thing I like, everybody likes it, the thing I don't like is the real problem". Isn't it just as valid for someone to complain the other way round? Anyway, I brought up the talents option, but I"m not sure either how big a problem per encounter spells are. They obviously do become quite significant as the levels go up, because they start making the entire class non-vancian, but removing it outright would probably leave glass cannon wizards really bored. When you look at spells like Adragan's Gaze or even Deleterious Alacrity, they clearly weren't meant to be spammed 4 times per battle, whereas even with highly effective spells like Fan of Flames, it's not a huge problem. You could start categorising spells into per-enc and per-rest from the very start, but handling two spellbooks would also get very cumbersome.

(1) Not everyone will take it. For someone who keeps yelling that other people should leave you alone and shut up about how the game should be played, you seem to have laser insight about what everybody else is doing. (2) Whether everyone takes it or not, the talent makes sure that a powerful ability doesn't come scot free but has a cost (and surely the cost is more than reasonable if you think 'everyone will take it') - and the cost means you now have a choice in how important that ability is, and how you want to build your wizard. (3) You're upset because making it a talent will make people whine... except they're whining right now anyway... and you surely don't want the ability to be removed.... so it sounds like you just want people to stop talking about it, in which case I'd probably bet that you're out of luck.

Overbalancing is certainly a thing and there's no need to achieve DPS Equality For All in a single player game. Still, it would be equally nonsensical to say that nothing should be nerfed or changed because the game has been out for too long or because we don't need perfect balance. The point is that designing the game to introduce interesting tradeoffs and alternative strategies makes things more fun for everybody, as long as it doesn't become excessive. The question with per encounter spells is whether it gets rid of interesting choices by making spell use trivial spamming. If you stop and think to yourself, "is it fun to cast Fan of Flames 4 times every battle and thereby 800 times in total", that's a better way to consider pros and cons than "omg u r nerfin wiz" or whatever else. Ironically, one of Obsidian's goals were to make lower level abilities viable throughout the whole game, and they did pretty well on that. I like the fact that level 1 / 2 spells aren't useless later on. But this is exactly what makes per encounter rather powerful. It would be interesting to make it a Talent available in higher levels, so that players again have a choice of developing their wizards into spellspamming bag of tricks or into a more focused character.

The simple answer is that you shouldn't worry so much. Just go where you like and do what you like. If you get wiped, try a few different tactics... if you are getting roadkilled, leave and come back later. As stated above, tactics and party composition (and player skill) has such a huge variation on difficulty that any "level 4 area" designation would be difficult. If you still wanted to know, one rough way to figure it out is to check out the defenses and accuracy of enemies in that area; if you try fighting one group and you see their accuracy consistently overwhelms your defences (which you can check in the combat log) and you can't land anything on them, that's a good sign to come back later. Oh, and there is zero level scaling except for White March content, which is scaled for any party of level ~8 upwards. This isn't directed at you as your query was reasonable enough, but in general it confounds me that so many people want to read exactly what to do and how to do it and where to go, and whenever they get killed they moan that the game should have told them it was going to be difficult. It strikes me that reading a website and obeying its instructions isn't particularly fun way to play, and that if you die a lot, coming back later would be a pretty obvious solution. But apparently not...

Gunner is a no-brainer for anybody that uses the relevant weapons (which includes arbalests) a lot. I'd say melee rogues are very fun and easily outstrip ranged rogues in capability, but if you are having fun with your ranged rogue there's no reason to change that.

Double click.

You're fine, since you could easily build some of your wizards to be melee fighters and others as classic glass cannons. You'll certainly need to micro a lot to get the most out of them, but hey, I play these games to micro.

It was incredibly cheesy, and ridiculously overpowered. It was always a little bit weird that just by spending 6000 gold (and early on it was much, much cheaper), you suddenly had an option that made combat magnitudes less difficult; now TCS players (including myself) will have to figure out different solutions, instead of every single playthrough being "raise gold for the Figurine of Win". As someone who loves his TCS runs, yes, it does make TCS way, way more difficult. But the game should be balanced first and foremost for parties, and for parties it was clear that they needed a summon time limit. I'll miss it, though. Tying survival to duration would be an excellent way to make it a bit less harsh, and to make that useless skill a little more important. 100 seconds would be nearly the same as "permanent" in the vast majority of cases, even in TCS.

Enemy AI seems to have taken on a few new tricks, and they are especially now willing to take disengagement hits when they see your engagers have crappy accuracy/damage. Solo stealth works fine. White March appears to have better encounter design than base game. As for whether this is enough for you, who can say?

My point is that it's easy to find people saying exactly the same thing you are saying... but about wizards, or rangers. It often comes down to the vastly different assumptions and preferences people have about the game. For instance, dismissing solo runs as 'for egos' shows you have no idea why many players who do mix in solo runs do it. That's peripheral to the debate about chanters, of course, but it's an example of how one piece of evidence ceases to matter for you because you don't see the fun/value in solo runs. I wouldn't ever argue that chanters are the 'strongest' class, or the easiest class to get right, but enough people have got enough mileage out of them to show that they aren't "objectively trash" for everybody. Of course, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be improved or retooled... it just means there's usually a more reasonable explanation than the rather improbable case of "omg they suck balls everybody who likes them must be completely deluded & everybody who defends them must be idiots".

A is slow, D is fast. There are also 'rewind' and 'fast forward' buttons on the circular weather/time thing in the centre of your UI. It's also in your manual.

Its not about enjoying their playstyle (which i guess you like never selecting them) its about they are gutter trash. I mean pure gutter trash class. Chants are weak, slow to come, and fall off. They cant damage, they cant CC, they can tank but why not take a tanky barb, and their invocations require a very poor party to get out before the fight ends. Their higher level chants ACTUALLY MAKE IT HARDER TO CAST their invocations. Higher level invocations actually take MORE chants to cast, even though high level chants take longer to churn out. The class actually gets worse as you level it up farther. Its shameful. And it pisses me off that the CEO of the company goes out and says how they don't suck. They do suck compared to everything but maybe fighter after 2.0 The only way he can say those things with a straight face is: 1. He doesn't understand the game and really doesn't know they are bad (my best guess) 2. He admits that people like bards, so he wanted to bring in more sales by lying 3. He didn't want to make Josh look bad so he lied This forum has seen everything from "wizards are trash" to "chanters are trash" to "rangers are trash" to "fighters are trash" to... Chanters sucking for you may or may not be universal truth, and something you think is transparently true, funnily enough, doesn't necessarily translate to it being true for everybody. I think it's often hard to notice chanters, but especially in a 6-man party, they can make an enormous difference to everything your party does... and still be a little bit less invisible than the Bard. (And, at least in previous patches, they were the easiest class to solo the game.) Anyway, Part 2 will most likely continue where Part 1 left off.

1) Wizards have always been rather powerful. 2) If you want strictly a 'nuke' wizard and no weapon waving, you can still create a powerful wizard. Fan of flames alone has people complain about the wizard's AOE damage. Will your total theorycrafted optimal DPS value be, I don't know, 70 as opposed to the 80 you could get with a melee wizard? Maybe. But who cares? Your wizard will still be a powerful nuker. Just play what you want to play and pick the spells that sound cool to you, especially on anything below POTD you'll be fine and he won't be useless.

You generally wouldn't play TCS without having played the game first, so you would know the skirmisher is there and prepare for him. There are a number of ways, even for a level 2 character. A wizard can open with Arcane Veil to dodge the first strike (or even just a graze), then Slicken or otherwise disable him first. A fighter with a fast weapon can just open with knock down and take it from there. If it was moved, almost every TCS player would just stealth around him. As it is you can already avoid 90% of the fights in the game - you can get to Act 2 with something like ten, fifteen kills. I think it's an interesting challenge.

It's generally not a good idea to sell your grimoires. Every time you retrain a wizard you forget every single spell you've learned, and you'll have to pay coppers to relearn them from those grimoires. So if you're not careful and sold the wrong ones you end up unable to relearn some spells. We've pointed out the absurdity of this design before; since there's no reason to unlearn wizard spells whatsoever, not to mention charging for spells you already paid for. But the devs insisted on it. Wouldn't even discuss why. Probably laziness. Interesting. Before WM there was no reason to keep grimoires you weren't using - you just had to learn and sell. (And anyway, you don't really need to learn all of those spells.) But yeah, it's silly now to pay twice for the same spell. I'm not sure what you're on about with 'unlearning' spells, though. There's no reason whatsoever to 'unlearn', respec or not, since a single grimoire can load on 4 spells from all that you've learned. It'd be interesting to know how many people actively change grimoires for combat? I find that 4 spells is usually sufficient for most cases, and even a triple crown wizard can get by most situations without switching. It's a pity, because I like the idea of grimoires.

As explained above, it's a +10 to your save within a d100 roll. Which is like a +2 to will save in AD&D: it helps, but it doesn't mean you're suddenly shrugging off most of the will attacks. If you want it to make a big impact, you'd want to build your character in that way. That might involve higher INT/RES to raise the base will, or combining it with Bull's Will to give a highly respectable +20. None of that is really crazy minmaxing. It does mean that taking 1 ability won't give you a huge difference on its own - and yes, this is much more the case in POE than AD&D, because of the way the graze system works. So sometimes the benefit is you're paralysed for 6 seconds instead of 12.

The Cipher is the best introductory class that works differently from D&D, has decent adaptability, makes you feel actively involved, easy to 'get right' in terms of combat effectiveness, etc.

No, the problem is that a tank build designed to hold an enemy is effectively a non-viable play strategy, and it's the strategy I spent 11 levels and 2/3rds of the game creating and using. The way the enemies are behaving in that map, it wouldn't be any different if you removed engagement entirely from the game--the battle would play out in pretty much exactly the same manner. The only reason to have a "sticky" mechanic in combat that I can even understand is to create a situation where tanks can hold enemies; there's always the option of breaking combat engagement, for a penalty, but it's not something that the AI should do every time, without fail, as their only combat mechanic. Fortunately, it's not. Not really. The other parts of the expansion that I've played have intelligent AI, much better than pre-2.0, but aren't doing that. I'm pretty sure that the enemies on that map are specifically designed to basically ignore engagement--it's showcasing what a combat-mobility focused group can do. And what it can do is seriously **** up your day. As I dissected earlier, your strategy has made you extremely reliant on a single mechanic. Any setup that hinges on a single dependency is, by definition, exposing itself to major vulnerabilities. If you weren't so reliant, or if you adapted your tactics, you might still have trouble, but it wouldn't be so catastrophic. Case in point: quite a few people actually criticised engagement for being too sticky before WM/2.0, because it was far too easy to rope enemies into near-complete staticity and then blast away at will. In any case, if you are right that enemies on a particular map are disposed specifically to screw up engagement and 'showcase what a combat-mobliity focused group can do'... that sounds really great. Like Shades/Shadows in Eothas Temple, it is always more fun to have specific enemies/encounters that force you to mix things up, instead of using the same basic template to victory.