Elric Galad

Brute Force is one of the rare barbarian abilities that enables him to do something else than just AoE. That said, my biggest pb with Brute Force is that it is far easier to debuff Deflection than Fortitude. Yes, threatening presence and Painfull interdiction work, but then Mental Binding, Shadowflames or various thunder spells come and target's Deflection becomes the lower again.

Sickened and Weakened Will and Fortitude defense debuff stack. But their Stat debuff don't stack. Go figure... So the total is -38 Fortitude and -34 Will.

The basic of wizard is his spells. Ice damage talent is recommanded because the best wizard damages spells are ice-related. Apart for this, pretty much everything is a bonus, and is mostly useful for trash fights. For hard fights, you'll be slinging spells most of the time. I'm currentlt using a High Per Interrupt blast wizard and she's pretty efficient, especially with minor blights on packed crowd. Even then, it's just icing on the cake compared to CC and damage spells. Furthermore, wizard and priest are more or less "default" build. No meed to create a build thread for it.

I used my main character, who, obviously, did not die or vanish permanently. No you don't. You need either 19Constitution or Diving Helm. How much Con do your character have initially ? With Caed Nua resting bonus, food, +4 Con item and Yenwood blade you can rise from 8 to 19.

1 - Devotion 2 - Wall of many colors 3 - Relentless Storm To complete the top list.

Yup, this is what I mean. Heart of minor blight's fury still work very well by the way.

You're not going to knock them all if your accuracy isn't high enough. Same for Relentless storm, wall of many colors, adragan gaze... Nothing in this game beats High Acc + CC spell. There are a lot of CC spells, from okayish to awesome. But there's only 1 spell that provide a HUGE party-wide Acc buff that stacks with most other (smaller) buffs. That's why Devotion is the best spell. Not to mention might boost and debuff, but that's only icing on the wedding cake. If you consider the best combination of 2 spells, there will always be Devotion + Something.

Too bad blast effect is only applied to the initial attack

Resolve only slightly dominate dialogue option. And anyway, it makes senses. Res > Per > Int > the rest. But that's not too bad especially if scripted events are taken into account. Resolve is not so useful when a burning roof falls on your face.

Normal on act I. Hard from act II. Act I is tedious and, as stated above, it takes time to understand the mechanics.

Embrace the Earth Talon is close to strictly better ^^ Defensive mindweb almost won the battle for me against Llengrath. Tanking the bog party was easy with this one.

Creating an awesome antagonist is tricky. For example, Irenicus was not very original. He is basically a power hungry evil genius like seen thousands of time. But execution is perfect, and he has some depth. Thaos has an interesting backstory, but he's far from being charismatic. And he has too few time on screen. But I have some hope for PoE2. IWD had a completely uninteresting antagonist, meanwhile IWDII had the twins. (The twins might have been the best IE villains if only they had more time on screen...) I hope they could reach the same level of improvement.

I told you Field Triage and bind wounds weren't so bad, especially with high might and int. Good work as always. I hate swift wind, but combination of draining and healing buff chants would be nice. Even if it reduces Seven night uses so I guess it would be a variant. This one would be even more fun as the 6th guy of a dragon trashers band.

Getting interrupted while casting Crown of the Faithful : Big fail.

Also the per rest/per encounter system bothers me. Per rest is ok for me, at least for casters, maybe because of Bg nostslgia. And casters have plenty of per rest so using them is not a problem (evef if it makes casters MVPs for boss battle). As many players, I don't like per rest abilities for non-casters. However, I'd like to see per encounter abilities to be replaced by cooldown. This would give an edge to non casters during battles of attrition. 2/encounter could be like 1/15s and 1/encounter could be 1/mn for example. This would be really good for paladin FoD because it would give them much more reliable DPS (though less spike damage), which is what many players wish for paladin !

Wall of many colors deserves a mention. And chained Shadowflames can win pretty much every battle of the game.

Adra Dragon is poorly balanced. Her breath can one shot a few party members. But with a few Hold Beast cast, the fight is incredibly easy. But PotD is not very hard. My mechanic wishlist : 1 - Better multiclass (or secondary class). In particular, one should be able full sets of low level spell through multiclassing. Multiclass could be done by extending current talents (series of talent). But Multiclass shall be commiting, one should not be able to select a Multiclass option without loosing other possibilities. 2 - More companions, all companions should be unique like Pellagina and Devil are. Companions should always have reasons why to choose them instead of henchman. 3 - Reduce dependancy to priests. Druids support spells were a good start. Multiclassing options could address the problem. 4 - Priests for all divinities. And a few more class kits (Paladin, Druids, Rangers and Priests can be expended too). And I think that's all. So basically, just expand the content.

Devotion for the Faithful. It turns the tides of battle.

PoE 2 as a fantasy naval setting. Valian Republic as main location but possibility to travel around the world. Raautai sounds fsntastic. Sunken ruins from a forgotten past where an old civilisation did know where Adra came from. Something older than the gods themselves. And a battleship as Stronghold ! But building an empire could be awesome too.

Druid are the best at single target DPS and have 2 priest-level support spells : Form of the Delemgan and Moonwell. Form of the Delemgan->Avenging Storm->Cat or Stag form = incredible single target DPS with 24 DR plus party buff and retaliation. No relentless storm has been hurt for this movie. Now if you nerf all storm spells...

You can trade with the 3 merchants at the same time, even after choosing a faction.

You don't have to side with the Dozens to craft the Spear. You can get it beginning of act 3 if you side with another faction. You will only get it a bit later.

I think bash shield grants a passive bonus to accuracy, maybe depending on the shield.

Do you know that it Bearcat International day ? (yes, they made a day for it) Bearcat, also called Binturong, is a relative of Bear and Cat. My avatar is actually a Bearcat. They are like 50% cat, 50% bear, 100% cool with a Popcorn-like smell and long Prehensile tail. They eat a lot of fruits, and spread the seeds all around the Southeast asian jungle. Googlelize it, it is IMHO the coolest animal on earth ! That's a Druid topic, so why not a Bearcat Spiritshift for PoE2 ? Or a Bearcat pet for ranger ? It would be SOOOOOOOOOOOO COOOOOOOOOOOOLLLL

Honnestly, I don't find PoE system to be that customizable. Sure, you have different build, and there is freedom inside class, but the most important trait of your character, by far, is still his class. Talents are free, but few of them are real gamechangers. For example, barbarian is still defined by carnage, and druid by his spells. I think it is good like this. I like party synergy based on complementarity. I like the idea of getting unique abilities that you get by commitment and long-term development. I prefer systems with classes. Or to be precise, I prefer system with class for party games and classless for single character game like Skyrim. I think it's more epic to have different characters following different specialized paths. Also because it's related to usual fantasy setting. Furthermore, I can't think of a single balanced classless system. But the drawback of classes is that around 50% of your abilities are determined, and the remaining 50% have often a few optimal ways inside a class. Basically you currently have around 11 characters with variations. Introducing a second trait equally meaningfull (secondary class) would open more possibility, but your commitment will stay meaningfull. Because class system is about that : meaningfull commitment. Basically, my intuition is that infinite choice is equal to no choice. Either your character ends up with a lot of random abilities (not epic) or only a few very similar and class-like builds will emerge, the rest will be subpar.