hilfazer

Do not worry. Unless Obsidian wants to go pure fantasy or follow the crowd, Inquisitor will be a cipher (cipher/priest most likely). Imagine how cipher powers would help inquisitors seeking the truth and finding those heretics. Wikipedia mentions 'investigative functions' - this is what Hadret House from POE1 is about. Rogue/priest could be named Witch Hunter and this is AFAIK pure fantasy.

Obsidian has an interesting idea about weapon proficiencies: Number of proficiencies is going to increase with character level and is constant between classes (with one exception). You don't need to pay for them with talents. It means modals are going to be more common in POE2, especially if enemies use them too. Sadly, current buff/debuff stacking mechanics are not that well suited for modals. Modals and spells are in the same category and it is a non-stacking one. You may be happy with your +damage - attack speed modal, but the moment your priest buffs you with +damage spell you'll like your modal much less - your damage bonus is now overriden by priest's buff and you get to keep attack speed malus. You'll end up not using your modal when buffed and you will be buffed because everything is per encounter now. Please consider making separate category for modals.

It's kinda sad most attacks will no longer graze. I really liked that miss/graze/hit/crit in POE. But maybe it will work all right. After all there will be more hits now and hits don't have their (often short) duration reduced in half.

I support metamagic. Spell casters need something to set them apart from other classes now, after The Great Unification has removed per-rest.

I wouldn't be surprised as well but i'd be disappointed. The big problem of affliction removal is that they can be reapplied 0.5s later equally easy. Got poisoned by a spider? No problem, you drink an antidote and you're fine! Half a second later spider hits and poisons you again. You've just wasted your round and and antidote, congratulations. Liberating Exhortation sounded great but didn't work as well because it wasn't suspending afflictions gained after it was cast. Enemies with afflictions on hit could ruin this mechanic, i hope Obsidian will not let that happen.

Thanks for the clarification, but I'm aware of that much - I'm just confused at this point what the individual terms mean. There are points for progression in the classes that equate 1/3 of a level, there is the actual level of the class, and then there is somehow a number that determines how strong your abilities are and which unlocks new abilities, and I'm kind of fuzzy on which is called what now. In particular, I'm not sure if adding 3 power levels on using empower means that you add 3 class levels or 3 thirds = 1 class level or if this goes into scaling yet differently. I understood the concepts, but I think the names are not very intuitive. When I think about power levels, the first thing that comes to mind is 'it's over 9000'... 3 power levels usually equal 6 class levels. Usually, because progression is not linear at the beginning. One class level grants 3 power source. Power usually raises every 6 source. Power level is by far the most important. Also quote from Josh:

They did scale, indirectly with wounds gain. And wounds gain... wasn't linear along all 16 levels. - At levels 3-4, you have around 80 endurance. And without healing you are limited at 8 wounds per encounter; with those xaurips poking you for low amounts of damage. - While during during end-game boss fights, monk has high endurance; healing and lots of health. He can take lots of damage in a short amount of time, resulting in fast wounds gain, and thus much more damage coming from his abilities. Ok, but i still have no problem with that acceleration. Doing more damage is desirable as enemies you fight late game are tougher. Wound acceleration is needed to fuel higher level abilities as they cost more: Torment's Reach - 1 Flagellant's Path- 3 The Dichotomous Soul - 8 It's similar to cipher's mechanics - your focus generation needs to accelerate to allow you casting higher level powers. And there's a chanter who sucked precisely because of lack of acceleration and eventually got it with a talent. Moreover some monk talents depend on stacked wounds. Wound cap is 10 and never changes. Acceleration will get you there faster, sure, but once you are there its benefit stops. Shhh... stop sabotaging my plan! But don't worry about this - people will be busy 1lvl dipping those barbarians and rogues (:

1. Yes, less spells / less slots, but yes. 2. Yes, less spells / less slots, but yes. 3. Yes, less spells / less slots, but yes. 4. Yes, less spells / less slots, but yes. 5. Yes, damage scaling with caster level keeps low level spells useful and accuracy is likely going to scale with character lvl. 6. Depends on how bad spells are going to be but not less than 50%. 7. Can't say how it felt, but since monk abilities did not scale with level (or did they? i haven't play after 3.0) wound acceleration was fine.

Designers want players to see their work so they are... helping them doing that. One example is in this thread, another example is multicalssing: "We've got that new awesome feature - multiclassing. And you'd better make use of it because we are reducing max party size."

Agree. I'd also mention that Black Jacket is not going to like inability to enchant elemental lashes.

I find it increasingly funny how people keep saying 'vancian, vancian' while what POE has is pretty much a leveled mana. In vancian you prepare spells, you choose which spells to prepare. In POE there's NO choice (well, almost). You choose your spell right before casting it like in every other spell system. The primary problem with vancian is that caster has prepared wrong spell. In POE it only affects wizards and only a little thanks to grimoire switching. People mosty have problem with daily limits. We already had per-encounter spells in POE. We know how it ended. Now Obs wants to do it again. I'm expecing huge drop in power. A different approach could consist of this: - add random encounters, no XP from combat is a perfect setup for this - add nighttime ambushes with chance of happening increasing with number of rests in given dungeon, it could decrease over time - add extra monsters when player enters dungeon again, after a trip to a village for those oh so important inn resting bonuses - give casters some weak per-encounter spells, so they can do something in every battle while feeling castery and still able to go armageddon with per-rest when situation gets dire Sure it's not perfect, it will surely need testing and tuning. You can grind for loot, yeah, but spawned creatures would carry something cheap or nothing at all until later stages of the game, but at this point economy goes out of the window in every cRPG under the sun so at least this one is not worse (: It can be gamed if someone tries hard enough as it's not supposed to be a hard counter. I'd rather make rest spammers life harder than greatly alter the game for players who play "as designers intended" and find it cool.

So if my hero relies on DEX and really needs prone protection and there's only one item with prone protection - "Boots of Prone Protection" i'm basically f**ed? But wait, i can use those gloves of +1 DEX! Whole one point of DEX... You poor thing! If only there were things like spells and class abilities you could use to work around that problem. In order to get a class ability i need to be that class and it's not like every class will have some prone protection option. Also remember it was just an example it does not need to be prone protection it could be something else. If they did it like POE1 i could handle such situation by equipping, say, Ring of Major Dexterity Bonus, even if there was just one such ring in the game. By this new, restrictive design we are loosing such options. So if my hero relies on DEX and really needs prone protection and there's only one item with prone protection - "Boots of Prone Protection" i'm basically f**ed? But wait, i can use those gloves of +1 DEX! Whole one point of DEX... If items work similarly as they did in PoE, the highest stat boost you will get from a piece of equipment is +4. That's nice, of course, but there are plenty of non-stat bonuses I would take above that. In your example, it's not even a contest. What would you rather have? A grand total of 9% extra speed or protection from one of the most debilitating status effects? Answer to this question quite obviously depends on amount of protection. I didn't specify it so it should be assumed it is something comparable to major bonus to DEX. BTW I can think of several more debilitating effects - paralize, stun, charm to name a few. And again - it's just an example. If PoE2 is like PoE, your character is never going to really rely on any attribute, so you'll be fine. I assumed, probably foolishly, that something called by developer "major bonus to and attribute" is going to be substantial. But if it's going to be meh again then allowing the player to stack several with items with same bonus wouldn't break anything. I'm pretty sure this design decision was made to prevent stacking.

They may kill fun by destroying some stuff, be it talents or weapon procs. While the sane thing to do is basically doing nothing. Having specific items influence design of your classes, their abilities is at the very least questionable (I really wanted to call it 'wrong'). Take that soulbound wand for example. It can make your druid spiritshift twice per combat. Now imagine devs are like this: "Oh no, we need to cut spiritshift duration in half because there exists an item that comes from a side quest so not everyone will get it, that can be obtained later in the game so it won't affect spiritshif early in the game, that can only be used by one druid while player can have up to six not to mention all other druids in the game, that player may very well give to his wizard or priest and since its soulbound it can't be easily swapped, that needs to be leveled by doing damage with it, that has a chance to give druid second spiritshift in combat effectively doubling its duration. Having duration both halved and doubled will result in pre-nerf duration that game is balanced around so it has to be the right thing to do!" There's so much wrong with it. But since the game is single player developers have the luxury of not balancing absolutely everything and addition of multiclassing makes me believe they want to take advantage of that luxury. The first thing I would not balance are specific, unique items.

Don't be expecting the game's story to cover all possible multiclassing options for all companions.

So if my hero relies on DEX and really needs prone protection and there's only one item with prone protection - "Boots of Prone Protection" i'm basically f**ed? But wait, i can use those gloves of +1 DEX! Whole one point of DEX...

Looks like Obsidian is not going to make is easy by copying Pathfinder. Not that i'm complaining, it's going to be more fun that way. Cipher+Priest = Inquisitor

Talents will be at 67% but there's also accuracy, health and defences and they depend on character level. 75%-85% refers to overall performance.

What's a proper two handed axe? A dane axe? I think it's too archaic for POE's setting. Or perhaps this: https://youtu.be/hYcObL61MsE?t=764 Not random: https://youtu.be/fvyrEhAMUPo?t=2092

Fighter 1, then Wizard 1 = 30 accuracy + 20 accuracy= 50 accuracy Wizard 1, then Fighter 1 = 20 accuracy + 30 accuracy= 50 accuracy It's equal! But it's so unbalanced. They'll need to find some hack for this. Personally i'd do "base accuracy = average(class A lvl 1 acc, class B lvl 1 acc) + X * (character lvl -1)" but i'm just a simple person who does not understand the superiority of 5 person party limit so what do i know ):

A reason for lower party limit could be trying to make combat slower: But i doubt it's neccessary or a good way to do it. Was combat in POE faster than i IE games? Yes, unless... you used Haste which is availible already at level 5. POE combat is NOT faster than IE combat if you used Haste. I once fought Firkraag and when his circle turned red he was already 'almost dead' (no, i didn't use *that* cheese). The battle was over in one combat round (thanks to prebuffing and summoning). Fights with Adra and Alpine dragons took me much longer. So perhaps POE combat is not too fast. But if it is, it can be made longer by making durations not that short. My palading got hit by dominate, it was a full hit not a graze. And what did he do during domination? He has reloaded his pistol! Nothing else, he didnt even shoot me once. When i get mind controlled in BG i'm ****ting my pants. In POE it is just 'whatever'. Josh also said party size can be made bigger through modding but UI might cause some issues. 6 is mathematically proven to be a perfect number, just Google Your Favourite Search Engine it. It is great for division, it basically screams "Divide me!" it divides by 2 and 3, oh boy so many options! 5 is just a sorry prime number. BTW Josh likes the idea of having to divide your party.

or drop subclasses altogether and make classes flexible and powerful enough to support different playstyles. I don't need such handholding.

with higher encumbrance making you more resistant to push/pull abilities (:

I've played all IE games to death, same with PoE. I was so happy that PoE kept maximum party size of 6. When they annouced PoE2 is going to have max party of 5 i felt like part of my soul has died. 1/6 to be exact. Gimme maximum of 6, please. That will cover all poll options. OEI can desing their game around 5 ppl, if they like, and simply tell me about it. I'm not stupid, i'll get the message. If playing with 1 dude on PotD Ironman is fine when the game is designed for 6 dudes (and it is because we get achievement for doing this) then playing with 6 when the game is designed for 5 must be fine too. 5 is the minimum party size i'm comfortable with. But it's an Obsidian game and i'd rather not settle for minimum.

Because you're reasonable person who actually spent some time thinking about the problem instead of jumping to the conclusion that multiclassing in POE2 will work like in DnD 3.5 and allow us to do Foo 1 / Bar 1 / Baz 18. Dualclassing adds HUGE amount of options, mixing more than 2 classes is absolutely unnecessary. Thus allowing players to mix more than 2 classes is inviting them to munchkin and break the system. Allowing to do Foo 1 / Bar 19 is another invitation to munchkin and break the system. However, i wouldn't be as restrictive as You are. Instead i'd require characters to maintain certain ratio of class levels. Which is technically same idea just with different numbers.

Come on, in PoE you are dealing with gods, all of them, and you can decide their fate (to give Woedica power or not) while in BG2:ToB you are merely sparring with god wannabe demigods. I'd prefer new, lvl 1 protagonist that starts by fighting xaurips and wolves (models are already there so why waste them?) and helping peasants but it's Obsidian's game.