clouseau64

i think that in addition to make power level matter much more for speels and ability ( typically spell acuracy and damage need to scale much more with power ) you also need to modify level zero abilities and bonus and make them scale with power. classes strength are too front loaded which makes passing up on multi classing bonuses too much of a sacrifice. for instance sneak attack could be 30% damage +5% per power level, paladin deep faith could be 10 +1 per power level....

Absolutely agree. My main point was to show that armor/pen in these kind of increments overule the rest and are tough to scale. My second is that blatant misbalancing can be easily avoided just by using these basic comparisons so that we can focus on testing the fine balance of it. Back to pen/armor, what i meant by the system is overdetermined looks like it's the same currency as base damage. they have just circonvoluted the system in two but there is no real trade off. Take the great sword for instance, it does 25% percent more damage than weapon that have +2 pen. so basically we are saying that against high armor we do 25% less, equal on same armor and 25% more the rest of the time. Really all that hassle for that? System like that can work for wasteland 2, because the linear path controls the tiering of weapons vs armor and you don't have abilities that drastically change the balance. for poe, i don't think so. I also dislike the new health system, because with the healing and lack of endurance/ health pool there is much less the feeling of a good difference between accuracy/ deflection and damage/health. there is no penalty for being hit often especially now that interupt has been overhauled. I hope that in future patch perception will stop being debased and brought to a pure dps function, it leads to stereotyping the builds, at least when it comes to weapon dps. unfortunately weapon dps looks like the only thing that we test extensively given that elemental spells or debuff/CC have been brought to oblivion.

i agree that paladin works well with skald as it can be a natural tank and intelligence helps both auras, chants and debuff. i am less sure regarding resolve as best offensive invocations are mainly about CC so require neither maxed strength nor resolve. Pally's FOD on a sworn ennemy is +35 acc which will often double crit and synergizes well. i find the class synergize very well with warrior as disciplined strikes gives a 100% hit to crit conversion on paralysed target, and extra perception +50% graze to hit is golden for invocation notwithstanding concentration. i have tried it as skald/unbroken to spear-head the formation, it doesn't do much much damge but crit flies and the golden trilogy shield cracks/ killer froze/thunder rolled can target any of the weak defense of ennemies which you can engage easily. into the fray can be useful to recenter stragglers into your cone. clubs work well also as modal is one of the good one ( -25 will). i might try next a dual wielding dagger /club or hatchet /club or spear/ club devoted as dual wield is too good to pass and extra armor is easy to get with plate. 10 pen on disengagement attack is a bit useless given how boosted they are and the fact that ennemies AI don't break engagement.

a 100 hours into the beta, and even after the patch, I remain pretty annoyed by the gross misbalancing of ability and ressource. I know it's only closed beta, but this is the famed sequel of a game which managed to reach great after its many patches and feedback from community, so our level of expectation is much higher. i feel that high priority shall be given in the next patch in fixing the gross misbalancing of some activty equipment and weapon modals so that we can actually test them ( spells with a decent cast time wouldn't hurt either as it looks like we all shun them). Here is quick heuristic focused on DPS ( and it's reverse survivability), comparing the impact of various ressource and their trade off. This is only approximative as the time element is not taken into account at this stage, but it shall already help in spotting the main incoherences and imbalances. Feel free to complete / comment. i put in bracket if the impact is multiplcative or additive 1 penetration (x) ~ 25% dps ~ 8 might (x) ~ 12 perception (+/x) ~ 12 accuracy (+/x) ~ 8 dexterity (x) ~ single weapon wielding (+/x) ~ 31 % of dualweapon wielding dps (x) ~ 4 power level for spells(x) ~ 8 class level if single class ~ 12 class level (x) if multiclass ~ 4 levels (+/x) ~ 0.5 x backstabb (+) ~ 0.62 x brutal whip (+) ~ 0.5 x 1 weapon quality level (+/x) ( acc,damage +pen) ~ 2 druid class level for claws ( 1 quality level / 4lvl) ~ 1 power level for monk fist (+/x) so 2 or 3 monk levels ~ 80% of potd difficulty ( +/x) ~ -20% dps through penetration modals for longbows, sabres, warhammers, stilettos (x) ~ 0.5 x marked for the hunt/ sworn ennemy (+/x) ~ 0.3 x lightning fist (x) ~ 0.25 x FOD (+/x) 1 armor (x) ~ 25% survivability ~ 5 constitution (x) ~ 12 deflection (+/x) ~ 12 resolve (+/x) ~ 3 x weapon and shield ( +/x) ~ -7% dps (x) ( through common armor) ~ - 4 % dps (x) if dual wielding ~ - 22% dps (x) through medium shield modal ~ -60% dps (x) dagger modal ~ 33% of paladin defense with deep faith (+/x) ~ -22% dps (+/x) through quarterstaff modal ~ 80% of potd difficulty (+/x) ~ 1 level (x, +/x) between level 1-5 ( hitpoint +def) ~ 2 levels (x, +/x) between level 6-20 ~ 4 shapeshifting druid level (x) ~ 12 x 1 shield quality level (+/x) ~ 1 armor quality level (x) ~ 2 x weapon and shield (+/x) warrior ability ~ 0.4 x mirror image spell (+/x) ~ 0.3 berserker rage (x) it becomes pretty clear, that armor shall be stacked to the max ( plate for everyone) rather than go for any of the other mitigant and that everybody shall dual wield. wearing a shield is particlarly bad unless you are an unbroken but why bother, be a paladin you get 9 times more delection and the same armor with the aura and can dual wield. it makes very little sense to try to limit the stacking of attribute buff, accuracy or deflection when the smallest unit of armor or deflection represent such a major gap in survivability even after the patch. we can see that one unit of armor/pen almost offsets potd difficulty and it is going to be extremely difficult to balance the concept with levels increasing. 5 pens is equivalent to the gap between level 1 and 20. It's even worse when one considers that pen doesn't go below 5 nor armor below 6 ( wearing no armor is a death warrant). Armor and pen need at least to be discretized further with increments that are of a magnitude 2 levels or 12.5 dps at the very least, so armor and penetration need to be doubled and on a much larger scale. it is also necessary to allow player to equip weapons that are in the bag during the fight otherwise it's forcing save scumming when armor have finally been uncovered. Personally, i find that the damage system is over determined with this new pen/armor system and that poe1 system was much better. for high armor/low pen the system worked just fine, it was for late game high damage that it somewhat broke. The reason it didn't scale late game was notablity because weapon quality increased at faster rate. if armor had scaled with level of the character by a multiplcative factor or that constition or resolve had applied a multiplcative factor that armor would have scaled just fine. If dev absolutely want to stick to that new system, then i suggest that armor qualiy level shall have a stackable bonus to deflection on top of the armor system, and that shields shall at the very least add to armor. higher quality of shields shall also have increments in armor and deflection ( +4 not +1 per quality level. Power is a new currency that looks totally necessary given the introduction of multiclassing. It look pretty obvious that penetration of spell shall at the very least increase twice as rapidly by power level ( having to wait 12 level if multiclassed to do one more pen is ludicrous), i would suggest 1 penetration per power level if penetration is more discretized or 0.5 pen per level in the current system). i also find that classes bonus are very front loaded with very large bonuses at inception or early tiers. it would make more sense to have those toned down and then scale with power or with level. Modals are just catastrophically balanced whether the defensive one which are all more punitive than armor in dps, or the penetrative one which in the best case scenario ( ennemy armor is 2 points higher than current pen) increase dps by 10%!!!!. one is much better off having accuracy and wait for a crit. The heuristics doesn't take into account time so probably overvalues constitution ( as healing is not in this picture) , defense and dps through recovery. it looks to me that either hitpoints need to be massively boosted or base damage toned down as combat is hardly lasting more than 5 to 6 rounds ( assume a round is 3s). In poe1 armor always reduced based damage and armor piercing modals only added back 5 damage, not a whopping 25 to 75% of multiplied damage, so damage look much bigger in poe2. We need combat to last much longer and not by overinflating recovery.

i have tested this extensively : to match the tooltip recovery value you have to sum up any bonus expressed in action speed term ( or dps increase with regard to recovery ) (A), sum up any malus expressed in recovery term (B) A-B is to be read as action speed ( applied to recovery on;y) if positive and if negative B-A needs to read as a recovery increase. tool tip tend to express all value in recovery term so you have to switch indeed with formula a = -r / ( 1+r) or r =-a (1+a), notably for the dual wielding which is confusingly expressed as -50% recovery rate and not +100% action speed ( applied only to recovery). the formula worked also with high speed enhancement, where summing negative recovery would have created problem. When the sum gets close to 1, action speed would have become infinite. Zero recovery looks not possible save for an unreachable high amount of dex, so at last one game mechanic gets fixed for the better.

i got something pretty similar to your example, and i can only arrive to the conclusion that formula for graze is inconsistant with formula for hit /crit. in your example i am not sure that soul whip and biting whip actually stack ( it depends if your example is prepatch or not). the only way i come close to the result is by doing 0.5x1.18x1.40x1.15x19.6=18.6 ( so multiplying all damage bonus over the penalty and assuming soulwhip doesn't apply). i got close form displayed result with other might value and high damage coefficient. perception definitely needs to be buffed and i agree with your comments on crits needing to be @0.5 mult. they completely debased that stat when they changed the interrupt mechanism ( definitely not for the best unfortunately). Given that i play potd i wouldn't fully dump it but there is clearly no point in raising it over 10 dps wise. I have a high perception on unbroken/skald as might is of no use on a tank now and their CC ( paralyse, - armor and the stun) is super solid with fair perception. i wish the devs were using basic heuristics when they modifiy ressources value so as not to create unnecessary imbalances

looks like destructive channeling is also bugged on graze as i don't see any increase in damage whatsoever when it grazes

hello all, i did a bit of empirical testing with various weapons, damage reducing modals, and various form od additive damage bonus. the 25% bonus from crit is indeed additive but negative damage modals and graze are multiplicative. i am struggling to find the exact formula but it looks like an exponential of the sum of negative coefficient as with no strength bonus nor positive bonuses a graze with parrying blade yields 33% of damage output. likewise grazing with a x% additive bonus versus 0 increase damage by a bit more than x/2 and the figure seem to increase with the size of X. Does anyone have the code of damage formula? I also think there might be a bug for crit when used with a negative damage modal, it looks like the 25% only applies to the damage bonus ( ie doing 1.25x30%=37.5% instead of 55%). Does any of you have the same result? I find it fair to have graze as multiplicative otherwise perception is a dump stat for any non CC caster / debuffer as it can be easily offset with damage bonus. On the other hand crit need to become multiplicative too.