TheMetaphysician

It has been additive the whole time since the game was officially released. It was only multiplicative in the beta, which made it too much more important than the other attributes.

So, I promised first impressions on the difficulty. The first island was hard like I remember early-game PoE 1 being hard on PotD. The Gorecci street fight was so hard I had to give up and come back to it after picking up Aloth and a few levels, and even then it took me three tries. And the dungeon on the first island was hard enough that I had to pay attention to the weapon damage types of my characters to eke out wins -- I never once changed a weapon set in combat my first time through on PotD and never got knocked out. So hooray! This is the perfect level of difficulty. I expect it to get easier once my builds start really coming together around level 10, so I anticipate needing to install the Deadly Deadfire mod then. But until that point, count me satisfied with this patch.

Paladin inspired defenses was nerfed from +2 to +1. That was a curious one; I didn't get a sense that was overpowered. (I'm just happy that PotD is hard now.)

In Even if it only has the base damage of a heavy one hander: it still hits several enemies at once with decent INT, has a longer reach than normal great swords (1.3 meters - not like a reach weapon with 1.8 but close) AND has some of the best enchantments in the game. Again the example of the 100% Riposte. You can roll a whatever/Wizard and riposte the crap out of everything around you with AoE attacks. With a Spellblade you even have the chance to riposte twice on the same miss (100% WotEP + 20% from Riposte passive). Barbs still proc Carnage on every hit it does (I guess). I can't see how that is pretty bad. It's not super OP anymore, that's correct. Also consider how early you get this. I just retested my frontliner Aloth as Battlemage with it again (wears that weird but beautiful Illusion-Mask and wields WotEP) and it's still a lot of fun. I'm doing the same with Aloth. How did you go about getting deflection high enough? Did you rely on Llengrath's Displaced Image by itself (which is what I'm doing), or did you use Arcane Veil instead or additionally?

I noticed they put autoattacking into the AI editor. Awesome!

If you have your party selected and click on a foe to attack it, that overrides the AI -- you've just commanded an attack. Is that what you are doing? If so, you shouldn't be surprised. If you don't want him to attack, don't tell him to attack, and his AI will take over.

Hey guys, I'm downloading the 1.1 beta patch now. I thought we needed a thread where people post changes they notice that seem important -- like changes to abilities, gear, etc. I'd also like impressions on the difficulty tuning. I'll post mine.

Sin Tee's build on youtube for Serafen uses that helmet; you can see it there.

This has inspired me to do a no-rest run. Can you tell me more information about the "Dirty Laundry" quest that forces you to rest? I can't find too much info about it on the wiki, and I haven't hit it in my playthrough yet. Can you get it pretty early? Do you have to do the Tikawara quest for the Vailian Trading Company first? How important is this quest -- are there other quests after it that depend on it, or can you skip it without losing out on other content? How low-level can you get to it and what do you have to do first?

I realize now I should have posted this question here: does anyone know how to use the console to unlock unavailable item upgrades, or to directly upgrade items? I want to unlock the upgrade for Xoti's Lantern for the "bad" ending, since the "good" ending upgrade is either bugged or stinks.

Does anyone know if there is a way to unlock item upgrades, or give the items the upgrades? The reason is that I really don't want to give Xoti the bad ending, but I really like her lantern and I'm seriously bummed that the "good" upgrade resists friendly buffs. So I want to give the lantern the "bad" upgrade, without needing to give her the bad ending. Anybody know how to do that with the console?

The Druid kit description says that water and frost spells cast "this way" are foe-only; "this way" pretty clearly refers back to the previous sentence which says that he gets a special set of water/frost spells as a Watershaper. So it is only the special Watershaper spells that are foe-only, and the kit description does say that. Oh mine, thanks, it does seem like what you can, only those auto learn water spells are foe only. Still,it's far better than storm caller. Agreed.

But, but, but: DRAGON!! (I basically agree with you, but that dragon is a great argument the other way, just for the coolness factor.)

Lots of stuff, but maybe my favorites are the city designs and the scripted interactions. Those two together make the world feel much larger in scope, more real, and more immersive.

The Druid kit description says that water and frost spells cast "this way" are foe-only; "this way" pretty clearly refers back to the previous sentence which says that he gets a special set of water/frost spells as a Watershaper. So it is only the special Watershaper spells that are foe-only, and the kit description does say that.

I didn't import a real savegame, and it was there for me.

This is great. We need more ideal-for-companions build posts.

One basic thing they really need to add is an option to direct autoattacks. As it is, I can't command, say, a rogue character to apply an affliction and then attack the afflicted enemy until the affliction expires. If I had an autoattack option, I could just prioritize the conditional "If target has affliction, attack" over the conditional "if target doesn't have affliction, use crippling strike", and it would work great.

Which hat is that, and where do you find it?

Where do you meet Rekke?

Does it seem to anyone else that most of the best ways to build your characters, including your companions, are to put them in melee? Or does that just show that I have some kind of melee bias when thinking up builds? I'd really like suggestions for powerful ranged builds, especially for companions. For example, can you make Xoti a monk or monk/priest that is good from range?

Help me decide how to build Maia; I've had her as a ranger, and it has been boring, and I'm starting over. I don't have my head wrapped around how to play a ranger, so I don't have a sense for what multiclass would be better: ranger/wizard or ranger/rogue. The rogue multiclass seems mainly good for Sneak Attack, right? Are there any other synergies? The wizard multiclass struck me as odd initially, but since wizards are so versatile, I'm thinking I might be missing some cool ways to play her. Any synergies you see? Pros and cons for one or the other? Thanks!

He could end the game in less than an hour through stealth but it would be pretty boring to watch. Don't know why you guys keep arguing with the people who don't want the game to be balanced, you don't have to convince them and the devs already believe balance is important. Just post whatever you think is overtuned, let the devs sort it out and ignore people who don't understand basic game design. I'd like to agree with this, but the devs do actually listen to the forums somewhat, and if literally no one was defending balance and everyone was complaining about it, they might get a false impression of what the playerbase wants, wouldn't they? I want balance, and I think I have basically Sawyer's view of it; and I should probably want him to know that so that he doesn't get a false impression of his fanbase. Also, in some of the debates over resting mechanics for PoE 1 in the forums years ago, I learned a ton about video game mechanics. So sometimes people really do learn new things about game design from the conversation -- not always the people posting, but sometimes people reading.

Here is the way I built him: (1) Focus on self-buff wizard spells: level 1 (fleet feet, spirit shield), level 2 (infuse with vital essence, maybe arcane veil from grimoire but that doesn't stack with the next spell), level 3 (llengrath's displaced image), level 4 (ironskin), level 7 (citzal's martial power). Set AI to auto-cast those (if you want more directions about how exactly to set the AI, let me know; I have some ideas). (2) Fighter priorities: disciplined barrage/strikes, fighter stances (upgrade one -- I use mob stance), weapon style, charge, weapon specialization, rapid recovery, penetrating strike (3) You can use either two weapons or two-handed weapons. I use two-handed weapons, Whispers of the Endless Paths early, Citzal's Spirit Lance (level 5 spell) later, to combo nicely with cleaving/mob stance. I think this build would work well with the spinning polleaxe too. In my experience, he does a little less damage than my fighter/rogue Eder, but he is quite a lot tougher with all those defensive buffs. The Whispers of the Endless Paths greatsword upgrade that ripostes on a miss works well with this build, since you can buff up deflection really high with Arcane Veil or Llengrath's Displaced Image. But I wonder if having two weapons would boost the damage compared to two-handed weapons -- I'll bet it would. Since he's a fighter with disciplined strikes, anything that triggers on a crit is good on him (like the gatecrasher gauntlets or those lighting gauntlets that do a lighting attack when you crit). Otherwise, I mainly just go with gear that helps his defenses or damage; I don't have a systematic philosophy for itemization. (If you think of one, let me know!)

I doubt it. I made peace and didn't get the armor.