Boeroer

Recently played: Unbroken/Street Fighter I hoped that the massive PEN of the Unbroken and the increased Sneak Attack and crit damage of the Streef Fighter (once flanked) would make Disengagement Attacks fearsome and also that Riposte may be worthwhile. Dumped DEX and gave him a sabre + modal + buckler + modal and plate armor, mainly relying on disengagement and Riposte. Well nobody leaves that guy now. They just knock him out and then go on with their thug life. Beguiler/Trickster With Blast I had a blast. Start by causing hobbled + bleeding via Arterial Strike in an AoE, then use Eystrike (and gain focus in the process), Whisper of Treason, then Arterial Strike again... Very nice CC character and ok damage. But I played him with a mod taht reduced casting times a bit. Mage Slayer/Goldpact Knight In theory I wanted to rush casters with Zealous Endurance and Golden Enmity and use FoD and Barbaric Blow in combo with the spell disrupting effect. Seems spell disrupting does nothing in beta 3? It applies an affliction but I never saw that attacks interrupted or canceled enemies' spellcasting. Or was this reduced to kith enemies and doesn't work on Lagufaeth anymore? It used to... Evoker/Fury Pure nuker. I wanted to expand the resource pool for damaging spells and only chose friendly fire spells that either do burn or freeze damage - as well as Returning Storm of course. I took a pale elf and gave him Bulwark and the Stormturner Cloak, too. He wore a breastplate then. With that much AR against burn/freeze I could easily cast Fireballs (also empowered, although that still hurts) on myself while doing a bit of baiting/tanking. Pretty nice - but only with the aforementioned mod that reduced casting times (and recovery) a bit. Else I could never spend all the spell uses during one encounter.

Bad: Offensive spell casting with Druid/Priest/Cipher/Wizard in general, especially casting speed. Summoning weapons is way too slow. I played a mod with 1.5 secs and that is fine. The morale of my crew goes down even if I serve them Rum + roasted Duck al'Orange with 3 Michelin stars. Average PEN is always one or two points below enemies' average AR. Spells' PEN is generally too low. Either passives with boost PEN or a buff of spells' PEN is needed. Worst: I don't like all the ship stuff. It's distracting and also unintuitive and gets boring and tedious pretty soon. But I guess that's only me. It would be great if one could just turn that whole thing off with a switch in the game options menue. That's the worst part for me I have to admit. Long recovery times make the combat feel sluggish. Good: Multiclassing is still a lot of fun. Casters' self buffs are generally good (with a few exceptions). Best: Beguiler getting more focus back than he spend when using Deceptive AoE spells in certain situations. It's really nice and not too powerful.

Great

A pure wizard is great if you focus on spells that scale well with Power Level. For example all Missile spells. But as Gromnir said: customisation is not the strong part. This may change though because we will be getting more passives in the future.

Also remember that in PoE a casting time of 4.5 secs was the slowest while in Deadfire it's medium. Placing a fireball in PoE was also easier because it was a fast cast instead of a 6-sec cast in Deadfire. All the damage on the world will not help the Fireball's viability of you have to cancel it all the time because situation on the battlefield is changing so frequently. Spells that target single enemies are in a big advantage because of that. Also because most of them scale really well with Power Level (see Missiles). At the same time some spells which are supposed to help with damage are inferior to a simple auto-attack with a weapon. The high PEN of Thrust of Tattered Veils is nice, as is the targeting and the fast cast, but I do more damage if my fighter just smacks the enemy with a great sword without spending any resources. Some spells need more balancing. I mean upwards. Look at Kalakoth's Freezing Touch: still the worst spell in the game. At least that didn't change...

That's not true. Instead of wildly speculating the "what if" I played a mod this week which reduced casting speeds by shifting most of the spells' casting times (especially cipher's) one category to the "left" (6 to 4.5, 9 to 6 and so on. Also summoning weapons was changed to 1.5 secs. It's still easy to do an interrupt if a spell takes 4.5 secs or 3 secs instead of 6 secs to cast. Interrupts favor fast weapons though - or you have to wait a bit before attacking just to see if the enemy will start casting something horrible. And that adds a bit more tactics. But the combat overall feels MUCH better with casters. Much better. But still it's easier to do the playthrough with melee character than with casters! Main reason is that combat movement is too fast in comparison to the rest and combatants like to change position very often. Most of the time because somebody dies while the caster is casting. Chars die so quickly in melee. I think weapon damage is too high. If you compare weapon damage to PoE you will see that base damage of weapons is higher. It's difficult to land an oh so mighty Fireball when during casting time the situation on the battlefield is changing thrice because melee chars kill two people while doing a 6-sec-cast.

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60459-project-eternity-wiki/page-9?do=findComment&comment=1978272

No, since the White March is seamlessly embedded into the main campaign of PoE (you can go there and travel back and forth as you wish) you can take all party members, items and so on with you.

Also the Carnage malus to damage is less severe. Downside is that damage bonuses and crits don't lead to significantly higher damage and that the ACC bonus of the fists will not work with special attacks like Barbaric Blow or Heart of Fury.

On hit/on crit effects for example. They also work with the cone. @Slack83er: Before getting Stormcaller you can't have exploding arrows. Other candiates are chanter with Stormcaller (triggers the stun invocation cone every now and then) or a cipher (triggers Soul Shock AoE from time to time). But the ranger with Returning Storm is cooler.

I think because multiclass chars already have access to two (complete) resource pools and can combine great low level abilites they are much more versatile than single class chars. I never understood why they also need more ability points at level up than single class chars.

There is the ranger with Stormcaller. It's kind of an exploding arrow.

I meant taking away spells that were there in PoE. If they'd design a completely new game with another background then they can carefully craft fewer spells without taking away anything. I also meant taking away spells in form of "removing them from the game altogether". It's ok if you have a more narrow spell selection at level up. But you should still be able to choose from the variety of spells that were in PoE. That's what I meant with limiting choice. But even if I find it ok that the spell selction is limited now: it takes away flexibility of casters. That doesn't need to be a bad thing per se, but it takes way something, too. The thing you gain is the more "strategic" apporach that you have to think about what spells to choose. That might be nice for char builders but it can also be a trap for beginners. Especially because I still don't see a retraining mechanic in Deadfire.

Removing redundant spells is ok. But taking away choice just because some people can't handle a few more spells is not. For example I really liked Nature's Terror or Spark the Souls of the Righteous. Not many people used those spells because they compete with other really good spells in that particular spell level. So if you take those away I (and others who liked those spells) will be sad and disppointed - and the only thing you gain is that players have to read through less spells. Erm... Also this "Too much choice! Please pick something for me!" is totally beyond me...

That's not right. Different players like different spells (if they are all implemented well and there are no trashy ones). If you want to cut down you could put the ones you like into your favorite list and forget the rest. You'd have waht you wanted without taking away choice from other players. Also: since when is forcing someone to do something in game considered to be good design? I think it boils down to what MaxQuest said: some people are just too lazy (or don't have enough time) to read through all the spells. Fair enough, but this game's target group is not casual players. As if the spell list of druids and priest is that overwhelming... If you don't know what to use and lose track of where which spell is and whatnot you could simply write down your favorite spells on a piece of paper.

I also fear it will be like Tyranny for me: one playthrough for the story, and one for a cool build - but that one I canceled because the mechanics just felt meh.

Then they could have made something like "my favorite spells" UI that you could compose yourself from all the spells and that is more prominent during combat - but you'd still have access to you other spells should you need them. But removing spells from the game? That's just a bad solution.

Yes, it feels like they indeed have no clear opinion or idea - or as you said: confidence - when it comes to the mechanics. I mean Ninjamestari... well, he's Ninjamestari with all the trimmings ( ) - but it seems he had a point in that "true vision" thread. But I still can't understad why a more casual "single-run" player should complain about universal talents being generic. I did countless playthroughs and still don't think that they are generic. Some of them are very niche or maybe too weak, but even the niche ones can be put to good use with the right buld. And I don't mean necessarily powergamers' builds. Made a rogue who specializes in scrolls: I could give im Deep Pockets. Another rogue wants to provoke disengagement attack in order to trigger Riposte more often: Fast Runner and Graceful Retreat. A wannabe Daenerys pale elf wizard who wants to bath in her own fire spells can take Scion of Flame. How is that generic? And how is taking away such things make the game feel less generic?

Good news. It was a big complain during in-house testing as well. Yesterday during stream Josh confirmed that they will remove it and you will be able to move/change spell without loosing your resource. Cool! Thanks Josh and colleagues! :highfive:

Yes, it is. Community manager Aarik D said so several times. Go ahead and do it! Here's a statement from him: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/95865-backer-beta-update-2-patch-notes/page-3?do=findComment&comment=1975048

Yes, or simply remove this mechanic and regain the resource if the spell didn't go off and if it wasn't interrupted by enemies - because you already spend a ton of casting time for nothing and that's punishment enough I'd say. But now you get additional punishment: the resource is gone as well - without the spelll getting relased. Because you had to cancel your casting because some Usain-Bolt-Lagufaeths on steroids ran all over the place like headless chicken on speed and punched you in the face several times and then ran away giggling.

I'm reading and writing in the PoE forum a lot and nearly since the beginning of PoE. Here, there was no substancial feedback like: druid and priest spells are to many: seriously? Too many spells? That's like saying "My mom bought too much ice cream". grimoires are not important enough: first time I hear about that - but the Deadfire solution is fine for me making Interrupt/Concentration mechanic clearer/cleaner: well maybe that was a thing, but I'm 100% sure nobody who said that wanted supersluggish casting times so that you can cleanly interrupt spells in clear way or something... I didn't read a lot of complaints about the armor system in this forum. Sure, it had its shortcomings the higher the damage output gets, but it wasn't a major issue, at least not here. The armor system could have been made less mushy with a percentage based DR value. Same with DR bypass. I can't say how much I want to punch those people in the shoulder who play PoE like one time and than say that something feels generic. Also, here in the forums I read very little about this. Where do the TON of people come from? moving away from per-rest resources: if you're honest that's your own wish. One could read several posts here and there that per rest is bad. But those people didn't truly understand what the advantages of per-rest are compared to per-encounter. In PoE you had casters who could really shine in tough fights while they may underperform a bit in easy ones (because you want to spare per-rest secources) - in Deadfire you spam out the same few spells over and over again in every encounter and have to specialize a lot. Actually it's more boring now. So of course here in the forum the changes in Deadfire are not praised. Because here we didn't ask for those and also frankly because some of them are reducing fun. Especially casting times and long recoveries! Maybe more listening to feedback from here than to feedback from Twitter would lead to something that is appreciated more - at least here. If that's what you are looking for anyway. The feedback that I read a lot about in these forums when it comes to PoE: - lots of bugs and with each patch there are new ones that replace old ones - documentation, clarification, explanation of mechanics are obscure/bad/missing/wrong - Rogues are strong in the early game but too weak in the endgame (no idea if this is still a thing in Deadfire since we can't go past lvl 9) - Chanters are too slow and a one-trick-pony with Dragon Thrashed (this got addressed in Deadfire - now you can't do without one like PoE's priest) - the calculation of damage done is not complete (no DoTs, no animal companion) - several issues with the start/end of combat and things like invisibility/withdraw/mind control - melee Xaurip Skirmishers and Phantoms are too strong with their afflictions on graze/hit/crit - Afflictions are to strong because they do the same debuffs on a graze, just shorter (I believe in Deadfire it's still the case that grazes apply the same tier of afflcition instead of going down one tier - instead disables like paralyze and so on are nerfed - no drop of defenses but hit-to-crit?) - some quests are a bit weird (see Ferry Flotsam) - deceptive disposition is counterintuitive: the more successful you are the more the people know - stuff that is a bit too good (focus through retaliation, Envenomed Strike in an AoE via Blast or Spirit Lance or Rot Skulls and so on) gets nerfed immediately and secretly (no patch notes whatsoever) while several bugs stay in forever - and more minor stuff. Of course this is a very subjective and biased list. The most important being the first two. I mean it's great if all the feedback gets a look. It really is. But it seems that you simply oversteered with a lot of changes to certain problems. Instead of trying out small changes you completely changed whole mechanics (DR bypass/DR to PEN/AR, automatic interrupts delaying actions to Interrupots completely deleting certain actions) so that PoE players are lost while it's not even more easy to understand. But I think I read somewhere that this is your preferred method: not to incrementally change something but to try a new, radical approach and then see what people say. Well, now you have it.

No, this is new. Never heard of that before.

The best thing would be to use the Helwax Mold and duplicate Bleak Fang after you enchanted it to your liking. Another alternative would be Vent Pick or even the early Azureith's Stiletto since Jolting Touch works with Deathblows (double damage).

Yes, Carnage doesn't do much in the early game because of its bad accuracy. And even if you're not mising you do grazes which lower your damage by 50% AND Carnage has a 34% malus on damage as well. So... really low numbers if you connect at all.