JONNIN

Monks are fine. They can tank, they have fine deflection and health and all. They also do tons of damage by hitting fast and hitting hard. I can hit about 6 times to every 1 by my opponent with my monk, and those hits are on par with a dual wield scimitar fighter for most of the game (ok, late game with dual superb and full enchants and all traits the fighter might pull ahead, but in a party, you can't have ALL your characters using fully loaded weapons... the monk sports a zero cost pair of hard hitting weapons). So the monk makes a strong tank/dps fighter alternative and can be fun to play. Paladin: one of the weaker classes, they really only excel as tanks that can rez your priest or druid without a scroll or heal themself if things go wrong. Higher spell resists than fighters etc, they are all around tanks that can soak spells and melee almost equally well. The problem with paladins is the game does not really *require* this good a tank, and you are *usually* better off with someone who can hit harder. Its meh either way -- an expert party does not need the supertank because they know the game and a novice party does not need it because easier difficulties can be tanked by any class. Rangers: strong ranged dps. Pet is about worthless but a well made ranger does as much or more damage than a melee damage dealer. I even did a play - through with the "three muskateers". I had 3 rangers with guns and a chanter buffing them with "something nocked arrows and such" (chanter also set up for ranged dps) and it was just bam, kill, bam, kill, bam, kill ... methodical focused fire dropped target after target. The 3 pets were all lions doing debuff roars and interference. It was fun, but not an ideal party... Um??? Priests have a SOLID mix of damage dealing, buffing, debuffing, and healing spells. Wizards have NO heals and most buffs are self-only -- they are pure offense. Druids are a priest alternative -- healing, debuffs and AOE damage focus. Ciphers have damage and debuffs mostly with one "heal" a number of "dominates". All 4 have their merits, you just pick what you need in your group... if you want a lot of healing, or a lot of ranged damage, or a lot of debuffs, or the cipher's no-sleep spell useage, or whatever. Most groups will do better with at least a little healing and some debuffs. Druids have their backup melee damage mode (shapeshift) for when an enemy gets past your tanks. The only fixes I would do here are: 1) ranger pet death does not debuff ranger so harshly. I would stun the ranger for 10 seconds or something instead. 2) druid needs a way to shapeshift for longer or more often per encounter. 3) cipher ... maybe start with 0 spell points and earn them much, much faster or something. They are almost required to use a blunderbuss, and that is kind of wrong. 4) paladin should have ... something. Maybe give it a shield mastery or access to fighter weapon mastery or something. Even making its aura area of effect much larger would be a start -- they barely hit someone standing next to them. But those are minor tweaks. Of all these classes, only the paladin is truly a weakling in need of *something*.

The problem with the difficulty levels ... AI is a big part of it. The enemy does not know how to use spells, buff and debuff. It does not know how to swap weapon sets. It wants to focus fire your casters but it won't take the drive-by hit to do so. It has no potions or scrolls. 1/4 of the fights or so would be very, very hard if the mobs coordinated and played smarter. Hard is redundant, its just normal with a couple of extra enemy. POTD is fine, its the next step up from "normal" really. Want it harder still? Need a new difficulty level, but again, if they just made it smarter....

level 4 to start it. After that you probably want to have your level equal to the level. That is, a level 4 party can probably reach level 4 down, and after that, level 5 party for level 5, ... level 8 party for level 8 ... this is rough but it should be a good rule of thumb. Three levels are actually dangerous: ogres -- they hit hard, and if you can't handle 4 of them at once, you either need to wait until you can OR be very, very careful about your pulls. Its doable 2 at a time if you are careful. Famyprs --- mostly dangerous because of the domination spell, but this level is significantly harder than the one above it. the final level. I highly recommend being max level and totally geared out if you want to fight. It can be resolved with talk.

you have to hit very hard to get significant life drain back. Fighters *regenerate* health at a decent rate. A fighter with a life drain weapon is very hard to kill if he has taken some of the tanking talents/traits. Life drain can kill the user. If your endurance never drops but your *health* does, you can find yourself still fighting (instead of knocked out) and dying when being knocked out *may* have saved your life. For this reason life drain on say a rogue can be more dangerous than beneficial depending on how well set up your party is.

if you delete all the saved games under a character's games the character will vanish from the list. Click on the character/party you want to kill and open it, and delete all the games inside. I would keep at least 1 good party save so you can tap the journal if you need to... a completed game will have a nearly complete monster manual so if you are doing a second run thru on POTD you can look up what the best armor and weapons are for a particularly difficult enemy... its all online too of course but its actually faster to just open the old game and look there.

POE is designed around 3 or 4 basic ideas. 1) positioning. The idea is to block the enemy with your tough front like "tanks" who can take a lot of hits. You do NOT want to let enemy get behind you to stick swords into your mage. Its possible to make your mage tough enough to handle it but that takes being an expert player and is outside the scope of "first play through" level of gaming. 2) buffs and debuffs. Things like using your priest to buff everyone's DR and deflection, and debuffing the enemy so they are easier to hit and take more damage. 3) damage dealing. You need at least 2, if not 3, hard hitting characters. That means someone with max accuracy and high might, as a starting point (if you want a full list of how to improve damage, see threads on the subject). 4) priority targets. About half the fights in the game involve an enemy spell caster or two. Kill those first. One trick is to have 6 slow to use hard hitting ranged weapons equipped and to fire one round from all your guys at the casters before switching to your standard weapons (your ranged characters may or may not use the slow hitters for standard, but your tanks need to get out their shield and so on..). Its amazing how trivial the throne room fight becomes if you kill the archmage(s) first. Fight specific: dont go up the stairs to his throne. Position in the room on the side (either side works) and send one spell caster to attack someone with a spell from "below". Run the caster back and fight them at the room's door, where they can't get past your tanks. Green targets (friendly until talking) can always be attacked with certain spells which turns them red. I forget which ones work, but for sure the cipher's blind strike and the priest's halt work.

Only the ogres seemed hard to me. The rest were relatively weak. I dunno, the rest of them are on par with other "big" fights like the mini-dragons (firey cave with bomb piece type) or raderick's hold boss etc type fights --- harder than 'random' wilderness fights but not really that difficult. The issue with the ogres is their spell caster is dangerous, has a lot of health (so the 1 volley of guns before weapon swapping does not kill it), and it hides way back out of range, and generally they hit pretty hard... all around it can be dangerous.

Reverse the roles. Make the paladins the tanks and build your fighters for damage. This would be fine.

Yes, some mechanics are mandatory. One place I can think of right off is to get to maerwald you need to open the door and its like mechanics 5 if memory serves, so you could maybe get in there with a couple of points if you had the right gear and rested bonus and all that. I can't think of too many other "mandatory" things to unlock but there are some mandatory areas that have deadly traps. The catch - 22 is that to bypass some locks you need to find the key which often needs.... mechanics to find.

... I reached level 9 before talking to the duc (the hearings that lead to act II) in a game made since 1.05 doing everything I could before moving on. I reached level 12 right after act 2 by doing the bounties as my first order of business followed by wrapping up the companion's quests and small jobs. If you are only supposed to hit 12 near the very end, it is not quite right yet.

that is neat! I found raderic's castle to be a loot rich cakewalk, though one or two of the caster heavy pulls can get tough. The only difficult fight is the finale /boss and that is trivial if you just get into a room and stonewall the horde with your tanks (its significantly harder if you try it out in the middle of the big room). I found all the bounties except the one ogre cave fight to be trivial as well. If you kill the casters first, the bounties apart from the ogre were not too challenging. The ogres are annoying because their caster has a ton of health, self heals, and tends to get out of range etc. the bosses seem harder than that to me.

I like to pick weapons that do best of 2 types of damage. Very few (really, just bosses) enemy resist two damage types at a high level. I also dislike fast weapons as after mid-game they begin to lose more and more per hit to DR. If you hit a guy 10 times for 10 damage each against a DR of 5, you did only 50 damage. If you hit the same guy twice for 50 each with a 2h, you did 90 damage instead... made up numbers of course... in game due to weapon speeds etc 1h are not quite that bad but you still lose a lot to DR. Also I like crush damage of the 3 it seems to be one where few enemy resist it, and of those, several are super weak enemy types like those stationary mushrooms that can't even damge you (they just dominate one character before you splatter them).

A fighter will have the following advantages that no other class can get: 1.) Armored grace - reduces armor penalty by 16%. A fighter in robes will be as fast as anyone else naked. A fighter in leather will be faster than anyone else in robes. 2.) Weapon spec and mastery - together will add 25% damage to all weapons in the same weapon group. Every fighter will have the above abilities. This will deliver more damage than a ranged rogue without sneak attacks who only has the 20% hit to crit talent and deep wounds to increase ranged damage. Compared to a ranger with swift aim a fighter will fire slower but hit harder with more accuracy, or fire faster with less accuracy compared to a ranger with vicious shot. Taking the defender and wary defender will greatly enhance the already superior defensive characteristics of the fighter. Going all in for offensive would get you confident aim for a 20% graze>hit (with 35% graze it would go to 28% graze and increase of 50% damage to 7% of attacks or a 3.5% increase to average damage) plus a 20% increase to minimum damage for a total of 13.5% increase to average damage. Either approach will also apply to melee attacks. Fighters are a lot more powerful than many here give them credit for. The ranger will also have weapon spec. And marksman, which the fighter might have as well. The ranger can reduce the swift penalty to -2 or 3 (I forget) accuracy, the difference in # of hits and crits there is microscopic. If we consider swift aim vs armored grace to nearly be equal, that leaves the fighter with mastery vs the ranger's pet link and such. I am not sure which of those will come out on top. It is probably pretty close. Armored grace comes late game, though. I was looking at total damage done over a game and the ranger was way ahead, but thinking on it, the ranger gets his damage early.

goodness... you can't do this at level 8 easily. That is a significantly low level party which means two things.... you did not do a lot of stuff so you may be using sub-par gear because you did not go looking for cool items, and you have reduced power in every category from being lower level... less hit points, I think your resists are bumped a little every level, you won't have the rank 6 spells, you don't have a couple of talents on each character, .... the list goes on and on but you are facing the level 12 endgame fight with too much weakness to beat it easily. And, you are stuck down there if you did not save somewhere before you went to the fight. Seriously though you missed half the game or something to be this low. Lowering the difficulty (or raising it) does NOT CHANGE the enemy's stats. It just changes the number of enemy. That has no real effect on the boss fight... easy might drop to 1 statue, not sure as I never tried it (?). But if you face 2 statues on easy, its the same fight as normal and hard. The dragon should lose a couple of additional enemy on lower difficulty but that will also not significantly reduce the difficulty. You *can* talk your way out of the dragon fights (both of them) which means you can come back on your own terms or just allow a peaceful resolution.

Gaming industry or many other industries, most reviews reflect a bias towards positive reviews. These are the people that gave the reviewer free samples of the product, early releases of the games, and spend advertising money on their site/publication, etc. Its hard to say "yea, they gave me a copy of this thing and bought $5000 worth of ads on our site, and a good thing too, because even being paid to review it and getting free copy I still feel like I was ripped off... its that bad ..." you don't see this. Instead you get a two thumbs up review that is focused on the good stuff and glosses over any problems. It takes a very, very bad product to get a negative review from the majority of established big name reviewers. That is why the best way to judge the quality before purchase is to read the beta tester's logs and threads to get a handle on unresolved major problems and to get third party reviews from customers, such as reading the amazon reviews (with a grain of salt as the developers and friends of the product will often post 5 star reviews of their own stuff). But the bottom line is that you can't really trust most of the reviews. The only way to know if it is any good is either to wait for a lot of people to buy it and see what *they* say about it, or to buy in early and trust your luck. As far as other types of bias -- gender, etc -- there is no doubt that high end video games (stuff like POE, the hard core stuff that is unlike the cell phone video poker games etc that anyone might play) are still targeted to their audience and that audience is still heavily male.

self defense! They attacked me!

I agree with most of what you said but IMHO a wealthy (castle owning hero with 10k+ copper worth of gear on his team..?) do-gooder would be a *target* for every thug in the entire region. If you are known to kill everyone you meet, they would avoid you or come at you with a much, much stronger/larger group. For that matter, why surrender... you just gonna knock them out and let them go, fight on and see what happens... The reverse is true too. Crooks that assault you should in general, if they win the fight, leave you naked and bleeding but alive.

the ranger has a talent that I *assume* one would take to increase speed of reloads and shooting. I forget its exact name, its a toggle that hurts accuracy a little and a later talent negates this effect -- or being a wood elf practically negates it with racial. So it effectly zero-sums the penalty and provides the faster rate of fire, which dramatically improves damage output. Without this talent which is not available to fighters or rogues etc, they shoot and reload at the same rates, all *other* stuff being identical. Ok, all things being equal (armor, stats, etc, everything except talents, then..) I agree with you. The ranger if wearing armor can swap to a shield and defend just fine. But in that much armor, with presumably some defensive stats (not a 20 dex 20 might build type wearing a robe..) it will be gimped for damage but still out damage the fighter set up for ranged combat by a margin of around 25% or more. But here is the point of what I was trying to say... the ranger in the back is the choice for dealing damage, and probably should be built for that, which means it would be a rather poor defender of the wizard. The fighter in the back, even naked with 20 dex/might, still will be doing only modest damage, and is better off just being armored and set up in a role of defender than trying to wing it as s pseudo-damage-dealer. So what I am saying is that all things here should not be equal --- pick the role you want the character to be best at (defender or damage dealer) and then select the class to fill it, rather than trying to force fit the wrong class here. And, again, IMHO the role of defender is --- really most useful to less experienced players, and of dubious value for elite teams.

There are lots of ways to play the class. People cite int, but int does not affect the range or duration of summons so if your focus is on summoning pets, int is of less value. I do not know if int affects the range of his chants or healing aura, and if so by how much, but depending on where he stands the size of the aura may be fine with basic (10) for int. You need int to use his aoe skills that damage or buff etc -- but the invocations are *usually* better spent on summoning allies. High int is one way to build. Low int is not recommended (below 10). Might is meh if going for a tank. The class lacks accuracy and is not loaded with talents -- it will never be a damage dealing powerhouse from use of a weapon. Damage comes from the summoned pets, and that combined with the chanter's damage is pretty high output. I would build a tank with high defenses, then, ... con, per, and res pumped up over 15 and the rest at 10 or so. Or, if not a tank, a high dex high might ranged damage dealer is possible -- damage output is still not top notch from the weapons but its solid damage backed by his chanting perks and makes a strong build. I guess the primary ways to play it are tank / with some aoe damage / summoner ranged damage/summoner / not much aoe or mass aoe major support character with low weapon damage and weak if any tanking ability (late game tanking with gear but lacking stats for it sort of thing?) and of course one can mix and match the above somewhat, to make say a medium ranged weapons high aoe.

A few minor bugs since 105 that may be older or known... anyway, if anyone missed the issues... - my wizard spell books keep resetting. If I remove the wizard from the party and rejoin it back in later, the spells are totally randomized, multiple books reset to their initial state, etc. - The game, when first started, sets loot back onto characters instead of remembering to put it in the stash or whatever. This is very, very minor. - if you kill an NPC that wants to monolog at you without talking, when you reach some floor trigger the game still pauses and does the "you are not in control of your characters" bit. The game plays on normally except for the empty, weird "cutscene" pause and screen shift. This does not happen every time, only sometimes, unpredictably.

Paralysis from the cipher can be spammed at a fairly low level, by level 4 or 5 you can use it 3, 4 and more times per fight. Wizard has a level 2 paralysis as well, but you only get a couple of uses of it at lower levels between sleeps. I can't recall if the druid has one that early or not. The cipher one also applies stuck in a large aoe and is extremely powerful for the first 3/4 of the entire game.

Factor out the common stuff when you list all the junk. Everyone can get marksman, everyone can be a wood elf or orlan hearth or whatever. If everyone could try to keep it focues on the differences that are class-only it would be a lot easier to evaluate. But even so, its not too difficult to evaluate: the fighter is sub par damage as a ranged build. Again, it comes down to rate of fire. The ranger's ability to reload and fire faster will out damage a ranged fighter all day long. The ranged fighter's role is to put a second tank in the back of your group to defend your casters/rangers/whatever if something gets back there to kill them. Whether or not your group and level of skill at the game need, want, or could make use of this varies greatly, but it is a FINE approach for a first playthrough. The comments in most threads are all about expert players doing max-mins and going on about level 10+ builds for doing late-game bosses. The ranged fighter has no place in any of that high level of play party building. The ranged fighter is for first-time players or folks trying a harder difficulty for the first time who may want a second tank in the rear of their party to handle things when their casters get rushed while doing average damage. That is all it is good for, really, and that honestly is not much of a role. I tried it and my final evaluation is that the character was a mistake and it is a fairly ineffective build.

consequences for bad actions far, far outweigh the good. I did everything to be an epic super hero of DB or whatever and had one problem: the priest did thought I stole the scroll instead of doing his diety's work .... which was fine, but I broke into his archives anyway because I should have been granted access, and the stupid librarians attacked me. Time I left I was busted all the way back down to neutral rep (well, it says "mixed" instead of neutral now?) for the ONE action. A bit excessive for a petty theft.

I tried auto resolve, and learned my lesson lol. I expected to lose some npc hirelings or something but not two entire structures. I had been fighting them but this was like the third one in a row and I was wearing a rut in the roads going back and forth so I thought I would skip the fight for once.

the skeletons are the weakest too. If you had rolled it yourself, he would summon a brutal phantom that is really good in the lower levels, and after that, 3 dragonlets that spit fire from range, followed by a pair of ogres that can go toe to toe with almost anything in the game. Con is mostly useless. It helps your tank to have say 15 or so -- but eder serves that role just fine. stealth really helps one thing, which makes no sense --- stealing stuff. Mostly the friendly areas, stealing is just junk, a few copper and plain items. Hostile stealing, like the "friendly" dragon's loot, it can be very, very nice as the beast will become MOST upset if you take its stuff and get caught. There are only 4 or 5 places where that sort of thing matters.