Tigranes

Maybe not, all of his posts seem to be rapid-fire streams of consciousness. I never expected POE2 to outsell POE1 regardless of its quality, but it's a bit sad to see it where it is at this point in time. I think Obsidian would really like to make POE3 if they can help it - having their own IP, and this kind of IP in particular, has always been important to them - but I'm not sure they could expect sales to rebound if long-term POE2 sales prove poor.

Some rumours of the Japanese team, that wouldn't be a bad place to go. One of the best teams to watch this WC. As for me, it is as usual the Eternal Despair of Arsenal.

Inter-game consequences never seemed worthwhile to me. It's way too hard to do relative to the payoff. I want to play the game to get choices and consequences in the game, that's much more rewarding & feasible than all this trouble of porting over saves and having it impact something else down the line.

It didn't help that he was so whiny about it. But to me diving and cheating is reprehensible and tons of players doing it only makes it worse. Diego Maradona is a legend, and at the same time, he cheated in a pathetic way. Doesn't get 'excused', we would get a lot more quality football without the diving and fouling. Thought Belgians showed some fantastic ball control and quick decisions yesterday - England well organised and decent but lacking that kind of quality.

'They look arrogant' has always seemed a curious complaint to me. When I play football I am perfectly happy with teammates or opponents that look arrogant. What is actually arrogant is the English thinking they are better than they actually are for decades on end. This time they actually got more further than their talent would indicate, which is a great compliment to their organisation and diligence. Whoever wins, I hope Mbappe is taught a lesson to stop turning into Rollmar the Second.

I like it, though it's quite clumsy at times. I also like that they tried to make it make sense. Now, if we'd only do something about "O Adventurer, if you would venture into the Gates of Evil, which lies beyond the Vanishing Desert if you take a left on the Intersection of Destruction right after the Subway Station of Shadows"

*shrug* you can already spam a ton of abilities by mid-level, I feel. You can already cast so many things, esp. with empower-refresh, that, for example, you can have your favourite Fighter buffs up for the entire battle - no choice involved there. I wouldn't mind a more general rebalancing of resources with single-classes in mind.

Yeah, I thought she was a bit of a moron, but it seemed to mostly be class arrogance + dislike of foreigners. It's a nice quest, since they're both a bit thick.

As someone who delights in England losing, Colombia couldn't really have any complaints. Did nothing up front and constantly sabotaged themselves. The ref was poor but not in a way that cheated the Colombians. But I reserve special disdain for Rollmar the Rolling Crybaby. Just go home, nobody wants to watch you whine.

I agree with you, but (1) not doing such stretch goals will probably reduce funding as well, reducing development hours total; (2) people just seem to constantly cry out for more and bigger things - like all the folks expecting Deadfire to be bigger than BG2 before release. I liked the Endless Paths, and do miss a single proper dungeon in Deadfire, but I understand that Deadfire's actually a pretty big game and they needed to focus on the core content - which in this case meant the islands and such.

I agree that just saying "it's a relic of the past" means absolutely nothing, and persuades nobody. For me it's part of my dislike of trash mobs or trashmob-like gameplay - excessive grinding, for example. Random encounters in, say, the overworld JRPG model, become a pretty integral part of the gameplay, meaning everything you do is padded by hours of fighting that usually ceases to have meaningful tactical variation. BG1/2-style random encs is obviously a little bit different. It's not as integral, and not really that annoying. I wouldn't hate it. That said, it never seemed to do a lot, either. It is very rare that a random enc would ever give you a battle worth remembering, and it wasn't really effective at making resting in dungeons or traveling feel dangerous. While a p&p DM can make such an encounter dangerous enough to be exciting, then give players creative ways to make it through, that's not really the case in CRPGs - it was just a chore to be woken up by 20 goblins. I know some people just want a game that never ends, so that they can level up to infinity and beyond fighting randomly spawning mobs over and over again. No problem, but I personally see zero attraction in that, and would much prefer that the game was built around custom-built encounters. Having five Adra Dragon fights is generally more likely to provide interesting and memorable challenges than fifty random encounters.

Nah, it's fine. They should be fixing combat clarity and performance, not getting rid of challenging enemy mobs. No comment on "graargh you nerf!!!" which you post in every single post in every single thread.

You can sneak past both groups on the digsite exterior without much trouble.

I'm sure you never try to do this street solo on L7 without gear on PotD upscaled :D And with Ghost Heart / Ascendant + Elder + Aloth L4 you can do that fight much faster that I do solo on L7 (without group splitting) No, I did it level 4 POTD upscaled solo without blessings. So? That doesn't help the OP, because that's a different situation.

Yeah, going in there with a level 7 dude or anybody packed up on various Blessings is a totally different ball game. It's eminently possible with a regular level 4 party or whatnot, though. Just treat it like a puzzle. If Aloth is getting instakilled & Eder very quickly too, well, clearly walking in boldly into the midst of ~7 powerful enemies is not going to work well. Can you sneak up on them and take one or two out quickly? Can you use sparkcrackers to lure some of them around a corner and pick a fight (or use sparks to lure them together then start combat with a grenade)? Can you blow up their most damaging enemies (rogues, wizards) ASAP? What's the differences in capability between your previous party & current one, anyway?

Well, if the question is whether POTD "requires" kiting, or mob splitting - no, it doesn't. But it might feel that way for some players, or some parties. If you find yourself consistently frustrated then just drop the difficulty and be done with it. As to the question of how representative the Digsite difficulty is of the rest of the game, it's probably one of the hardest places in the entire game relative to your party's strength.

POE was set in a quasi-renaissance, guns and science intruding on medieval fantasy world, moment from the very beginning. I love that, because we have 80 million medieval high fantasy worlds - but of course it's fair that you might have preferred the latter. If you haven't yet, I'd recommend checking out Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale (originals, not 'enhanced'), and upcoming old school isometric games set in a more typical fantasy world - the Pathfinder RPG, and of course Realms Beyond:

Why waste hours of your time like that? Just use cheats if you want your character to be good at everything & have access to everything. While I would never play that way, you're certainly free to do so. But you might as well give yourself those extra attrib & skill points in 5 minutes instead of 5 hours! The Unity mod on the Nexus is a great way to modify a bunch of stuff, including attribs/skills.

Lots of people seem to use it, I don't & won't. It's up to you, just like console commands and cheats. I enjoy working within the default parameters to come up with builds that are imperfect but get themselves over the finish line, and I also enjoy having to mitigate weaknesses. Hence I also enjoy lower level gameplay and not having just the right items. That means most/all of the blessings and console commands are not for me. I think some people prefer just getting their build to the optimal point as quickly as possible, level 10 or 12 or even 15, with all the gear and such, and then start actually playing. That's not a problem. It depends on what level of challenge you want, and what part of the process you really enjoy - the journey of gettng there, the pleasure of seeing a well oiled build blast things, the precarity of a solo character, or the "convenience" of a solo run without all that vulnerability.

Seems like I'm spending hours doing nothing but running away and summon-cheesing until I'm at level 16, which is usually the point where most builds/parties start to steamroll the opposition (most of which, with unmodded upscaling, will be too weak to put up a fight). So lots of work up front, and then... eh? I'd love to try soloing a priest/wizard, though. Is it your experience that the character just can't put up a decent fight until lv10 or 16? With a more martial solo setup, it's possible to start at level 1 and do Gorecci St and the drakes without too much cheesing, and also start exploring islands at level 7-8.

Enervating Terror is definitely a gamechanger, so yeah, I think it matters that you get it (or how early you get it). After all, after ~level 15, you've played 2/3 of the game and the challenge is gone. Ranger also gets a big bump with Driving Flight a bit later, but it probably doesn't compare to Rogues getting Finishing Blow etc & Monks.

Can't agree more with everything Boeroer said. It was already a big problem in POE1 and they have done nothing to address the issue. It just is incredible that scrolls becomes an easy way for you to cast the spells far more effectively than a real wizard.

I don't play wow and I don't understand MMO language, so let me know if I'm getting anything wrong. First, we got experience of this when in early POE1 it was pretty easy for fighters to attract everybody and engage them, while others could stand around - and then later POE1, where enemies would actively target vulnerable enemies. There's pros & cons, but the latter provided tactically a far superior experience; combat was more dynamic, instead of just dumping everybody's CON to 3 and then having all the enemies stand still around the fighter. Second, again maybe I misunderstand, but it also depends on how you build your characters, yes? POE1/2 don't force you to build a dedicated tank, or a CON3/RES3 fragile snowflake. After all, your party & strategy will depend on the game's systems and enemy design. So e.g. in BG2 you're more likely to build mages that are fragile WMDs, and even double up on arcane spellcasters and then work around protecting them; in Deadfire I'm more likely to focus on various forms of nonmagical attackers. BTW, for engagement, most of the issues in POE1&2 stem from people being too afraid to break engagement. Just break it, it won't kill you if you're smart about it. Engagement doesn't mean you can't move anymore from the rest of the battle - sometimes it makes tactical sense to prepare, take the hit (and/or mitigate it), and then run.

Guess what? The last patch didn't nerfed just one item, it nerfed most items while they weren't even OP... So your example and justifications are just bad... In fact I would say that most items/abilities are now completely irrelevant because their effect is just a joke. Do you even ask yourself why your PoE2 character has weaker abilities/items than his PoE1 version? Now there are just a handful of core abilities used to differentiate the classes, while the rest is just fluff. Also I'm surprised you find OP when a fighter can 1 shot an enemy (and why everyone picks melle as examples?), while a mage who tanks like a fighter and can 1 shot all enemies at once is just fine... Why nobody calls for nerfs for casters defenses/damage? Who needs weapons now? You pick the melee class with the best suvivability, you combine it with a caster and you still have a better character than any melee class/weapon combo you had before the patch. People will start to talk now about how melee A/caster is so powerful and then a guy like you will come saying that it's obvious the melee A should be nerfed because it's simpler than to change all the casters. How do you like my example? Did anyone say that "all nerfs are good"? Anybody? No? I agree certain 1.1 nerfs were unnecessary and excessive. My point was that too often people state that "buffing is better than nerfing" as a rule. Which doesn't make sense. It's not buff vs nerf. It's relative strength & making significant differences within that. E.g. the biggest thing I would recommend is scaling down the level-based acc/def gain, in which case the 'nerfed items' would suddenly become far more significant (and actually would have to be buffed across the board).

You realise you were the one going on and on about how this game is for people who like story and is not for people who like hardcore combat? You're not any better than him. It's not entitlement to state that POE is a niche franchise that was pitched at old school CRPG players & funded by them. We don't "deserve" anything, we're simply the target audience. Where there is room for debate is what exactly that niche is. I would agree that plenty of people who backed/bought POE & enjoy older CRPGs also turn out to enjoy relaxed difficulty in all areas, from resting to combat to XP to gold. So personally I'm fine with resources being invested in things like story mode or companion romances, even if they are not for me. That doesn't mean I can't suggest ways to make the game more difficult, and be disappointed when it doesn't turn out (which is different than slamming my face on the forums and whining).