the streaker

And is it? It's been out for a while now. Balance isn't that important, tbh. But a good TB is a whole other experience and would get me back in the game if it was good enough!

The difficulty was never severe enough that you needed to use stuff to get past something. If you struggled, it's usually cause you made a mistake and a reload would fix that. But not knowing which fight you might actually struggle on encourages you to hoard for that difficult fight that never comes.

Well let me tell you, OP, that I've been waiting for something to top the Godfather trilogy for 30 years and we're no closer to that either.

I don't know how relevant this is anymore (I guess half as effective), but pre- time parasite nerf, an ascendant cipher in light armor and decent dex used to be able to hit ascendancy, then time parasite a group and proceed to machine-gun any cipher power imaginable at a blistering pace. Quite deadly and IMO made cipher one of the better single class classes in the game. Anyone tried it recently? Throwing disintegrates and amplified waves on everybody is serious business.

That's why they have cooldowns on scripts. What simpler way is there that will work for all kinds of different quirky situations?

Yeah but you don't want your cannoneers, surgeons or helmsmen to be putting out fires instead of doing their jobs.

You need to assign deckhands to tasks like putting out fires, etc. no?

Go back for some svef... pretty good display of why charm/dominate is so important for ciphers and how much poorer they are without it.

Wrong forum... but Xoti is religious in a world where gods obviously do exist to some extent, so it's not equivalent to our world.

I suppose over/under-penetration should give you a set % damage increase/decrease (say 10%) for every point you have over/under the target's armor. Not sure why there are "breakpoints," I've never thought that to be good game design.

I don't actually think it's a bad idea to balance based on uniques, because it doesn't take long for your entire party to be outfitted in uniques. Who uses vanilla weapons past the early stages of the game other than maybe guns for that first shot of the fight? And even if I did, +1 pen wouldn't change anything. It's quite rare for 1 pen to be the difference between underpenetration or not, and if it were, I'd get my 1 pen through buffs/debuffs or a different weapon. If I'm in the overpenetration range, I'm probably killing trash mobs anyways so who cares? You'd have to make the pen bonus +3 or so for it to start mattering, which might not be a bad idea. i played in potd with scaling options. i find many mobs have high armor that i often find myself -1/-2 under penetration. That's huge -25%/-50% damage. So +1 does help alot if you asked me. Only for estocs versus extremely high armor targets, otherwhise you'd be far better off switching to higher pen unique single handed weapons or guns

It's even worse than that. Defensive Mindweb now breaks on *any damage*, i.e., including grazes, so on PotD it's basically a soap bubble -- one Chill Fog will wipe it from your entire party in a couple ticks, every time, gone before you finish the recovery animation. It's in the same practically useless category as Ancestor's Honor and Wild Leech now. You're right, it is a joke of a level 8 power for non-ascendants. For ascendants, in tight situations it feels worthwhile to throw it down every so often, to soften blows. You have to gear your party for stacking defenses, though, otherwise it does nothing.

A ton of unique weapons have some wicked modifiers that only trigger on crits... and my Ranger/Rogue Maia was second in the group in damage dealt with minimal micro, so I'd say they're not too bad.

You don't play a fighter in BG2, you play a party of 6 characters. There is plenty to do in the battles without having to select every character and use up their class-specific mana to use full attack abilities which have no downside and it makes no sense not to use them all up in every fight. Little thought involved there. Might as well set the AI to use them automatically. Then might as well not have them and make them passive.

What a 180 degree turn for ciphers. They went from the spell spamming class in PoE 1, to the class with the slowest build-up play and weakest caster in PoE2. Every other class can unload all class abilities and resources immediately in every fight, whereas the cipher starts out with minimal focus. Every other class benefits from the switch to per-encounter abilities, ciphers get nothing. Ironically one of the best cipher subclasses, ascendant, gets hurt by leveling up because your focus pool increases and you have to do more damage to get to max, and after you pick the few good powers, the rest don't really help. Also, you usually never hit max a second time. In my mind it is strictly a multiclass option. The flat damage bonus is never bad, and you only have a select few good powers so you don't actually need any more points in cipher after picking those few. It's a shame that defensive mindweb is not available to mc ciphers, because I love using it in combo with borrowed instinct and a shield to create an untouchable aura around my guy at the start of a tough battle. They freaking nerfed this one too, you used to be allowed to spread the party out after casting the mindweb, now it's an aura... (edit: wrong about the aura, it still sticks after you separate)