KDubya

I'd actually vote for trying out Josh's new Resolve that randomly empowers your abilities. It might be a lot better than people think and regardless that's probably what will be in the game.

With the new Resolve a Cipher with Psychovampiric Shield gets a +5 Resolve I think so if you had a few invested and a few from an item you could easily get to a 20 Resolve with minimal effort and have a 30% chance of empowering your powers. That sounds worthwhile and even fun. if you went all in with a 20 base resolve you could get to 28 easily for a 54% chance. If nothing else it'll keep people from dumping it so much Wasn't there a priest spell that buffed Resolve like 20 points or something like that? That could be pretty sick with the new system.

I'll have to wait and see what the numbers and the effects are. Would a 0 Resolve have 0% and then climb from there? Randomly getting a powered up Empower might be fun. Regardless if this is what it takes to get Might back I'm all in.

The +100% damage on disengagement is part of the game, everyone gets that so disengaging from some heavy hitter like an Ogre is going to hurt. The +10 penetration on disengagement attacks is a perk of the Unbroken sub class. I think there is a big +accuracy as well. PS Your missing a few statpoints, you could have an 8 str with everything ten with an 18 per, 15 int and 18 Res. To get to a 10 str you'd only have to drop the 18>17. PPS There is talk of reverting strength back to Might so then you might drop Resolve to ten and make a 17 Might.

Are they rebalancing armor as well as changing weapon penetration to 7 or 9? If not light and medium armor looks totally worthless as even low penetration weapons will go right through them. Even plate at the same value as the high penetration weapons looks to be of questionable value. Will have to see what they have come up with but with release being five weeks away not sure how much can be changed based on feed back from the next beta.

If the choice is between: Keeping Strength and the new Resolve with Resolve also getting a random powerlevel power up Reverting back to Might and the old Resolve I opt for #2. Or are they talking about adding the random powerlevel power up to the old Resolve? if that is on the table that sounds pretty good. Keeping Strength/Resolve and adding the power up just further rewards min maxing and dumping strength and maxing Resolve for any sort of caster which sounds bad to me.

There is no DR, only armor vs penetration. If your penetration is greater than their armor you do full damage. Disciplined Strike and its upgrades are one of the best abilities in the game. It gets you the +5 Perception buff and converts grazes to hits, upgraded it gets a good hit>crit effect that was +50% but might have been changed. Yes you need to be below 50% health, but with your Constant Recovery regen (which is buffed by your Resolve and Intellect), your high armor from plate and your good deflection from your shield (and weapon and shield style) you probably won't be below 50% health very often. I'd find a way to keep Intellect at 15, drop a little from Con and Resolve if needed, larger area invocations with longer durations plus longer chant linger makes Intellect a good choice.

In PoE I did PotD runs without priests. With a chanter regen aura, veterans recovery for more regen, and Zealous Endurance to reduce incoming damage via hit>graze healing was easily handled by LoH. Whenever that wasn't enough there were scrolls and potions. In DeadFire Priests get one ability pick per level up which may or may not get used on a spell. There like three different spells needed to drop all the afflictions and I'm not sure that it'll be worth it to spend the points. Plus afflictions are not near as bad as they were in PoE. Factor in possible racial protection from afflictions and certain classes also having access to affliction protection and a Priest for affliction protection doesn't make a lot of sense. Priests are versatile and powerful enough to want them on the team for many reasons but primarily affliction defense is not one of them.

I'd keep strength at ten anyway, no big payoff to gimp your damage. A Skald would be a great choice. You'll have a good Perception, access to Disciplined Strikes and if you use a spear, club, dagger or rapier get another +5 to accuracy. All in you'll crit pretty frequently which as a Skald will get you more phrases. The lesser costs for offensive invocations are great as well. The armor debuff is godlike and the paralysis one is pretty good and even the lightning stunning one is pretty cool. Shields affect spell accuracy but a medium is not too punishing. For proficiencies I'd go with a one hander that has an accuracy bonus like spears, clubs, daggers or rapier. The best armor penetrating one hander will be a stiletto since maces and warhammers do gimped damage. Sabres are always a top choice as they do more damage than anything else plus they'll probably be way over represented again as well. Regardless you get a lot of proficiencies so don't sweat it. Not sure a Fire Godlike will be that great for a tanking guy as you'll need to be damaged in order to activate the racial. Nature Godlike gets a nice power level boost which will make you multi comparable to a single class, or something like either Orlan, Mountain Dwarf, either elf, or Coastal Aumaua would get you a decent racial that doesn't require your tanky guy to get beaten up first. Intellect always helps with durations and AoE so definitely don't dump it. If you don't want to shapeshift I'd avoid Druid. For armor pretty much go naked or go heavy, at least unless they change how things work from the beta. Having your armor being above their penetration drastically reduces the amount of incoming damage that does manage to hit you, but once they start to penetrate you might as well be wearing robes.

At accuracy = deflection each +1 accuracy gets you +2% damage. This sounds worse than Strength's +3% but it doesn't consider when the extra accuracy gets you a crit which adds +50% to your penetration which may get you a multiplicative +30% damage for over-penetration. Plus as your accuracy gets lower than the deflection each additional accuracy helps more - its better to get more accuracy against the tough hard to hit enemies. All of this is hard (impossible?) to accurately calculate so most everyone just sticks with the simple acc=deflection and the +2% damage that that represents due to trading misses for crits. So as is Perception is probably fine.

I was thinking that a new system could be something like this: Wizard casts spell and as it does damage he generates more mana which can then fuel a more powerful spell or you can keep with the cheaper spell until you have enough for the big daddy spell. Sort of like focus generation for a Cipher but its based on spell use.Not sure what to do for priests or druids? Regardless of what we want, nothing is going to change in the short time left. I'm thinking if i want a Wizard it'll be a multiclass with Devoted, Paladin, Monk or Cipher and just use the quick buffs and a summoned weapon while initiating combat from stealth with the best nuke I can.

I agree that something like this would be good. Make me choose between Meteor Swarm and casting Jolting Touch eight times in a row or whatever. As it is now I'll start every time from stealth with Fireball, Meteor Swarm, Call to Slumber or what have you. Only getting one spell pick per level up just makes it worse. I think the reasons go back to getting rid of all per rest abilities and endurance/health becoming just health. At that point they must have correctly decided that four casts per level would be way too much and went with two because one would be too little and three is still too much. Then you make spells much longer to cast and interruptible in order to tone them down. All of which makes spell casting unfun, repetitive and both under and over powered (under powered in that they take so long to cast while in combat and over powered in that you can stealth alpha strike with the biggest spell you have every battle)

First off, if it was up to me I'd rather that back in PoE they did not have any Vancian casters (or elves or dwarfs for that matter - the new Orlans and Aumaua plus humans and godlike would have been more than adequate while being fresh and new). Make a clean break from the past and go forward with Ciphers that generate focus via damage, Chanters that build up chants and then either made something unique for wizards like needing to cast a low level spell to then cast a more powerful or some other sort of unique mechanic rather than per encounter or per rest. Unfortunately this did not happen and we are where we are. That said what can be done to improve casters in DeadFire? PoE had per rest which at least theoretically gave you some sort of strategic resource management where you'd save your best spells for the tough fights. Now rest spamming removed even this slight restraint and Vancian casters are universally considered to be in a power tier all their own regardless of how much rest is spammed. Now DeadFire makes all spells per encounter but decreases casts per level to 2. At low levels (this includes the Beta) you will be limited to maybe six or eight spells per encounter which might end up running out. At higher levels you won't be running out of spells when you get 18 or so casts per encounter. I envision DeadFire spell casting to go like this: Approach enemy while party is stealthed Move wizard into range Cast your most powerful AoE damage spell or hard CC When the spell lands combat starts Cast a few quick cast low level buffs like Infuse with Essence, Fleet feet and some version of a defense buff like Mirror Image. This should take less than 0.5 seconds per buff so three is probably the limit Cast next most powerful spell repeating as needed until enemy is dead Approach enemy while party is stealthed ..... I don't see this as particularly strategic, tactical or even fun. Looks like it will get pretty boring. Suggestions for improvement: Change casts per level to some sort of resource expended that increases with spell levelSomething like you have 'x' amount of mana or whatever to use per encounter and that can be spent on one or two massive spells like meteor swarm or lots of smaller spells like flan of flames or such. This would then make dropping the big nuke instead of a steady stream of magic missiles into a tactical decision But since we are like six weeks from release I don't think there is any chance that anything can or will be changed.

Worst - The Monk unarmed damage getting reset after a save load Multiclassing breaking all sorts of game balance Sabres are again the best weapon choice by far Island Aumaua being made worthless. Their old racial ability was great and added lots of flexibility. The new one is some sort of joke. Changing Might to Strength. In PoE the stats set the game apart from DnD and that was good. Now it just makes for another clone. If you had a vision for Might being soul power or whatever, better to have stuck to your vision and made sure that the writing in game reflected that rather than bowing to vocal complainers and changing a major cornerstone of the stat system for what appears to be a wily nily reason. Having so many dialogue skills, is there really a use for having diplomacy, intimidate and bluff? Is the writing such that all can be applied to most conversations? Making Vancian per rest casters into per encounter spamming the best spell everytime forever. Should have totally redone the whole system into something like a Cipher or Chanter where you built up something to let you cast off bigger spells rather than just getting two casts per level which'll get you like 18 spells per encounter by the end which is just idiotic. You're going to end up casting the biggest damage nuke from stealth Every. Single. Time. Stacking rules for buffs that are obtuse at best Game mechanics that require some serious deconstruction by people on the forum to figure out what the damage and speed formulas are. Just spell it out in complete detail in the in game wiki or whatever. Developers responding on third party sites like Something Awful instead of here on the official boards. Sort of makes it seem like all of our comments and observations from the various Beta releases have been a waste of all of our time. Best Multiclassing making for some really cool builds The artwork looks great as does spell effects. The armor and penetration mechanics should probably have gotten a complete re-design of all the weapons, spells and armor rather than just importing the same values from PoE and tacking on the armor and penetration system. Currently there looks to be no use for light armor ever and it'll be either go super heavy or go naked. If you are ahead of the armor curve combat is pretty easy while if you lag behind you'll be crushed, hence the popularity of Skalds, Berserkers and Devoted. So many game mechanics have changed from PoE that it is more a new game set in the same world rather than any sort of sequel. How this gets balanced into something both challenging and fun will have to be seen to be believed.

A Kind Wayfarer/Soul Blade also makes for a very good character. Paladins bring so much via sworn enemy, LoH, FoD and the on kill effects, while Soul Blade has a very nice damage buff, a penetration buff, a massive raw damage focus dump and the chance to cherry pick a few great powers. You can't go wrong either with the cipher combo or the Eothian priest. Actually paladin/anything is really really good in the beta. Will have to see what high level abilities are lost and see if multiclasses still dominate.

Its a Shattered Pillar Monk so you gain 'wounds' by doing damage just like how a Cipher gains focus so there is no need to take a beating so Con doesn't help as much. Plus the change to health only without endurance means as long as you don't get Ko'd you have enough Con and healing can overcome a normal or even low con easily.

I wouldn't dump any stat on any class except for a nuking wizard dumping strength and adding it to Constitution. With a base 10 resolve Soul Annihilation is still going to do an awful lot of raw damage basically for free. Its not as if the difference between a 15 Resolve with +15% damage will make that much of a difference. I'd look at something balanced like this: Strength 18 Constitution 10 Dexterity 15 Perception 10 Intellect 15 Resolve 10 Strength will multiplicatively increase your large bonus damage from soul whip, dexterity is always good for attacks and spells and intellect helps with everything duration based. Maybe go with nature's Godlike for the increase to power levels to help with the unarmed damage output.

The free +12 accuracy for single wielding is very good and easily the equal of the free +30% attack speed from dual wielding and is comparable to the inherent extra damage that two handers have. The only discrepancies and shortcomings are in the Fighter only talents for weapon styles. There the single weapon talent is pretty much crap while the other two are pretty good. Since this shortcoming only affects Fighters who take single weapon style I'd guess that it is really low on the list of things that need fixing.

Monk unarmed attacks are still bugged in that after a save load they revert back to an unbuffed state. This makes testing an unarmed monk near impossible, but when it is working fists appear to be the king of damage output with good damage at the fastest weapon speed. Good fast damage increased by soul whip and the occasional soul annihilation dump of all focus into raw damage will be pretty strong. The Cipher Soul Blade brings soul whip for damage, a +1 penetration to weapons, soul annihilation for a focus dump and access to the Cipher powers, while the Shattered Pillar gets you attack speed increase from swift strikes, a 30% lash from lightning strikes, increased penetration and damage from Thunderous blows and a spammable Torment's Reach that stuns in a cone. Plus both gain wounds/focus from doing damage. Lots of potential synergy, just have to see a game version where Transcendent Suffering works. Plus we'll have to see how power levels affect unarmed damage and what high level abilities will be gated off by multiclassing.

As Boeroer said it'd depend on how much of the game remains when you get that high level ability and how good it actually is. Consider Dragon Thrashed - without knowing any details or specifics if you were told that multi classes lose out on getting Dragon Thrashed you'd say it makes multiclass Chanters gimped. But in this game Dragon Thrashed is pretty damn terrible so losing it would not matter. You'd have to look at each class in a case by case basis. Spamming low level abilities like Torment's Reach while adding the additional flexibility of a Barbarian, Rogue, Fighter or Paladin might be equal or better than a pure monk. I'd say that this is probably the best sign that there will be some sort of a trade off between single and multi classes and that would be very appreciated.

Concerning the Barbarian at start: If you are talking about the Berserker you need to consider the malus of the self damage and the friendly fire of carnage due to berserk. In the Beta at level 6+ you have enough health and access to healing to pretty much ignore this damage but at level 1-3 you might have real issues with killing yourself or your team. I'd put paladin up in the best starters. You get FoD for a nice damage burst and you can have LoH for a nice heal. Both sound pretty good for low level. Add in Deep Faith at level two for a massive +20 boost to all defense and you are the best in the game at that point in my opinion.

You can win with glass cannons with enough CC on PoTD. I just play different. Every single one of my back liners has some emergency ability that makes them much harder to hit or unhittable for a duration. Just in case they take heat. This gives me time to CC or focus fire the offending enemy. It also greatly depends on how you view knockouts and resting. I try to finish a PoTD run through with as few KO as possible so I favor durable builds like monks, paladins and Chanters while avoiding any glass cannons or even casters and priests to keep the difficulty up. My teams might not even have any backline, everyone is a frontline melee with mutual support from auras, chants, and healing (from the consecrated boots). If no one is squishy then no one has to be defended.

As it currently is balanced, single wielding a sabre is near the top dps wise and that is without taking into consideration the potential for extra penetration leading to the multiplicative 30% damage boost from over penetration. Also it doesn't consider that the most challenging enemies will also be the hardest to hit and where the extra accuracy will be the most useful. DPS in Ranked Order After latest Beta Patch 2/2/18 Dualwielding Sabres 5.66 DPS Dualwielding Fast Accurate (Daggers, Clubs, Rapiers) 5.50 DPS Quarterstaffs 5.27 DPS Single wield Sabre 5.22 DPS Two Handed Sword/Pike 5.22 DPS Dualwielding Spears 5.02 DPS Dualwielding Swords/Battle Ax 5.0 DPS Dualwield Hatchets 5.0 DPS Single wield accurate (clubs, daggers, rapiers) 4.98 dps Single wield sword/battle ax 4.62 dps Single wield hatchet 4.61 dps Single wield spear 4.56 dps Sabre with shield 4.21 dps One hand fast accurate (club, dagger, rapier) with shield 3.86 dps Spear with shield 3.74 dps sword/battleax with shield 3.72 dps hatchet with shield 3.71 dps

One handed weapon use is still the best way to get crits, just don't waste the Fighter only ability and take 'single weapon style'. Just equip only a single weapon, preferably a rapier, dagger or club and reap the benefits of +17 accuracy and watch the crits come rolling in. Or go with Sabre which is again the best weapon damage wise and also probably the best in magic items due to the setting.

Not to mention that all of the deep and detailed discussions that we have here on the official Obsidian forums NEVER get any participation or feedback from Obsidian because they only discuss on other forum boards. It makes me wonder what the point of having a beta was in the first place. Things we've identified as being a concern: Resolve not having a use - 'fixed' by trashing Might and making one or the other a true dump stat for many and a massive headache for any hybrid. Dual wielding being 45% better than anything else - 'fixed' by slowing down all combat recoveries. A better solution could have been to reduce penetration and damage but keep the speed. Multiclassing, especially of two melee powerhouse types being decidedly better - 'fixed' by reducing the benefits of many abilities such as berserker rage, lightning strikes and flames of devotion. Sure that makes them weaker but it makes single classes as weak if not more so. Power levels affect some abilities massively and others are untouched but both are non-described in game and only by trial, error and taking notes can you determine what might be the effect. Early abilities being much more powerful than their higher level upgrades - Consider Constant Recovery; the free ability is much better than the higher level upgrade. Swap that around and single vs multi gets a little more balanced. More things that I can't recall If the game was going to be based on the game elements from PoE then that'd be fine but they are massively changing everything and it does not appear that they are doing a very good job of it. I suspect that (given the holidays) we're still within the dev cycle loop on a lot of this stuff. So far each beta has introduced new stuff for feedback but we've only seen one round of changes. It's about time for the next balancing pass, so let's see what happens then. I'd expect that this is it for beta updates. Its two months from release, I'd assume that the gameplay is set and from here on its all about QA/QC and bug hunting/polishing. Considering that the beta version is much older than what the devs are looking at, I'm not even sure that our bug hunting is of any use. Obviously our gameplay suggestions are moot so we'll just have to see what we get.