Boeroer

Beautiful! (If I ever decide to complete my paused crpg project I will def. hire you. ) I really wonder why it wasn't done like this in the first place. All those slightly different recovery values now! What for? I agree that summoning weapons should take a short amount of time. Comparable to self buffs (basically summoning a weapon IS a self buff), so 0.5 seems like a good value.

- double post, sorry - ...stupid phone...

There are currently six "types" of summoned weapons in the beta: - Kalakoth's Minor Blights - Firebrand - Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff - Citzal's Spirit Lance - Priests' faith attuned weapons - The Long Pain Except the Long Pain all summoned weapons got nerfed in terms of base damage. In PoE1 they all had higher base damage than their mundane versions. In Deadfire they have not. Priests' weapons all get a +60% corrosive lash at lvl 6 which is very good. I guess the lashes will get altered in later stages of the beta to fit to the deity. Citzal's Spirit Lance's AoE effect now works like Carnage did in PoE: it works with on-hit effects like Swift Flurry or Lightning Strikes and also generates focus. That is more powerful than in PoE1. The same is true for Minor Blights. They are awesome with Swift Flurry for example. The rest of the weapons have the same effects than in PoE1 I think. Combined with the lower base damage it means that Firebrand for example is not better than a usual great sword. It just does burn damage instead of pierce damage. The weapon that remains nearly the same is the Long Pain I guess. In PoE1 those weapons didn't scale with your char level (exception: Long Pain). In Deadfire they do. They don't scale with power level, but with char level. The worst thing is that the summoning process now takes a whopping 6 seconds and they can only be summoned in combat. This means you lose a LOT of combat time before you can actually join the fight, which is a shame. Other self buffs are usually instant or fast casts, but weapons take ages to summon. All in all summoned weapons feel nerfed. Mostly because of casting time. In the case of Firebrand obviously because it does nothing special except doing burn damage while it costs you one spell use and 6 seconds of casting time. Parasitic Staff "only" drains health but besides that is a normal quarterstaff. Its awesomeness in PoE1 stemmed from the fact that it came exceptional and with high base damage which was very powerful at lvl 1. Later on it wasn't that useful any more. Now it's okish at lvl1 if you want to cast around for 6 secs - and stays okish until the end because it scales. I liked the old approach better.

Parasitic Staff and Firebrand don't generate more focus than normal weapons of the same quality because they have the same base damage as their mundane counterparts. That is different from PoE1 where they all had higher base damage. Priests' faith attuned weapons do generate more focus because the powerful lashes also contribute to focus gain. But you will have to summon the weapon which takes 6 seconds - in which you could have attacked with non-summoned ones. So it depends how long the fight lasts if this is beneficial or not. Citzal's Spirit Lance does generate a ton of focus because the AoE damage also contributes to focus gain and has a very weird AoE behaviour with Soul Annihilation as I already described above in an earlier post. I think it's bugged and I reported it in the bug section but got no reaction.

A bashing shield doesn't give you the 50% recovery bonus that dual wielding will give you (at least that was still the situation when I played a shield rogue at PoE version 3.04). That's the main reason why bashing shields usually lower your dps compared to a normal shield (because bashing does way less damage than most weapons and you simply alternate between bash and weapon attack with speed gain. Bashing has low recovery so it speeds you up a bit compared to a single weapon, but the bashing damage usually is so low that it will ruin your overall dps). Exceptions a Full Attacks obviously (also, bash has quite high ACC and works well with applying blind/hobbled and so on. Bash gets +1 ACC per char level because it's considered to be an ability) and special bashing shields that apply some nice effect when they hit/crit, namely Badgradr's Barricade (Thrust of Tattered Veils on crit, works with Deathblows) and Dragon's Maw (which can't be soulboud by a rogue).

Holy cow outta hell! Where did you get that awesomest Krampus sweater, Katrina? I desperately want one of those!

Yeah... good old tradition of OBS to screw things up even more with a patch.

Crit damage usually is +25% in Deadfire (not +50% like in PoE1). So, something's not right with Assassinate: either description or implementation. In the first iteration of the beta it didn't work at all with ranged weapons while it did with melee ones if I recall correctly. Maybe this fix now wasn't done properly. You'd also want to add Backstab when using an assassin and maybe some dev got confused with all those dmg mods out of stealth...

The raw DoT doesn't stack?

I installed the linux version of the beta today and tried some more casters. Did a Nature Godlike single class Evoker and used an empowered version of Minoletta's Concussive Missiles. At least that cast was VERY powerful (12 projectiles each causing an AoE explosion). It's a 3-sec cast and thus doesn't feel awfully slow. But once you touch the 6-sec spells (see Fireball) it becomes tedious business. The balance between melee and casting got better since the weapons' recovery times got fixed, but casting still feels sluggish and is no fun.

No. PotD is too easy for a full party if you did some playthroughs before. It's because you have good meta-knowledge (you know where to expect which enemies and you know what they are vulnerable to and so on) and usually you know the game's mechanics in and out after some runs. So you can always choose a very effctive approach for each encounter. You will know that accuracy + hard CC is the most important thing in this game and trivializes most encounters. This makes most of the game very easy even on PotD. Only exception is the early game where you don't have a lot of resources - which also isn't very hard but more difficult than Act II + following.

The setup that gets you the best dps curve troughtout the game (if you want to stick to one "style" and types of weapons and don't like to retrain) is to use a dual wielding approach with rapier + dagger (Weapon Focus Noble) and get the Sword of Daenysis (Defiance Bay, Ondra's Gift, Salty Mast, Club of Ref. and Prest. Gentlemen, merchant Vincent Dwellier) and the March Steel Dagger (Defiance Bay, Copperlane, quest item if you don't give the dagger to Gordy but instead keep it during the quest "Something Secret", it's a supereasy quest). That is because you will reach 0 recovery very early and fast, light weapons are the best dps option for rogues. Those weapons have the highest dps by far against 0 DR because they are so fast (speed is a multiplicative damage influence instead of MIG which is only additive) but have trouble to punch through DR. This can be solved with any form of DR bypass and also with lots of dmg bonuses. Rogues have great dmg bonuses and that helps with overcoming DR. Also, you can use Vulnerable Attack without speed loss at some point because those weapons I mentioned are not only fast because they are light, but also because they both have the speed enchantment. Try out the speed calc with the PoE Attack Speed Calculator by MaxQuest. If you choose rapier + dagger and click "Has Speed" for both and also add Two Weapon Style you can play around with different armors and stuff to see how and when you can reach 0 recovery. Later you can replace March Steel Dagger with Drawn in Spring because that is the weapon with the highest dps in the game - and it's a dagger, too. Sword of Daenysis will remain the best dps option until the nd if you enchant it EXCEPT if you duplicate Drawn in Spring with the Helwax Mold (item from a stronghold quest which lets you clone one non-soulbound item). This is true for auto-attacks. If you pile a lot of Full-Attack strike abilities (Crippling Strike, Blinding Strike and so on) so that you seldomly do auto-attacks then sabres (here: Bittercut is the most potent choice) might be the best weapon for your rogue. The advantages of both variants is that it's not only powerful but totally fits rogues when it comes to style. I personally prefer war hammers on rogues, but I have to admit it doesn't feel very rogueish. If you want to make your rogue more sturdy you can raise CON, MIG and INT and pick Veteran's recovery as first talent. Also use a thick(er) armor at the start of the game This makes a huge difference. Knocked out rogues can't do dps, so...

Right. But basically it works like in PoE1. It didn't stack the effect. Only thing is that now every kill triggers it while in PoE1 only every second kill (was supposed) to trigger it. It stacked with all other speed buffs though. Still the case?

Even if they want to achieve more "tactical depth" (who needs that anyways?) - with longer casting times vs. interrupts - and thus can't shorten the castin times a lot, they could still go and make the damn effects more powerful. Casting Whisper of Treason for (what feels like) ages in order to charm one enemy for mere 10 seconds is just a biting whiplash in every cipher's face. Casting a lenghty fireball that might get interrupted or has to be retargeted all the time because enemies run around like headless chicken during 6 seconds and then doing nearly the same damage as you would do with an attack of a rod + blast is just meeeehhh!

No it doesn't make a lot of sense and should be changed to dual wielding (like dual wands). I just wanted to say that in this case the two-handed approach wouldn't hurt this special subclass very much if it could only deliver a good casting experience. You wouldn't attack with your natural weapons a lot anyways i you could instead deliver some good elemental nukes + CC.

Well the Fury is supposed to be an offensive caster subclass. You get some bonuses on your offensive elemental spells and also a kind of "escape" ability that's not a spell. Sadly all offensive casters are (still) bad with the current beta build - a few whimpy bonuses don't help that.

It's def. casting speed that is the main issue. You can have 6+ spells per encounter pretty quickly - but you just can't use them all in battle because it's over after 2 slowish casts. A paladin with 6 uses of FoD has no problems applying them all. You can see that builds that use fast casts (self buffs for example) are rated very useful these days while every char who mainly uses slow spells (which are supposed to be powerful) just blow. They are so bad, it's really upsetting me although this is only a computer game.

The speed didn't stack in PoE1. And I don't think this is supposed to happen in Deadfire. This would be crazy powerful. Maybe they meant the duration? Does the duration stack if you kill several enemies?

Tidefall is only better if you can achieve 0 recovery with it. If you can't (for example because you don't want to use potions) then dual Drawn in Spring is better. Generally speaking I think Drawn in Spring is better. But the biggest advantage of Tidefall is that you can get it so early. And the draining is very good for front liners if you have decent dmg mods.

Neither. It's just a spell that has 0 range but it's not really a melee attack. It has its own accuracy and damage. Your weapon doesn't matter at all. You don't have to hit with your weapon or fists in order to apply those spells. So you have to pretend that those are "special" unarmed melee attacks - which is easy because they have 0 reach and thus you have to be in melee range.

Concerning Kalakoth's Minor Blights + Devoted: isn't it so that the chosen weapon of the Devoted has to be a melee weapon? Or did they scrap that idea? I would have created an unarmed proficiency. It is a type of weapon after all. And the modals come with gains and drawbacks anyways, so no big power gain here. That way you can always decide to insert some additional "unarmed" weapons like pit fighter gloves, knuckle dusters, artificial claws, push daggers, whatever that use the unarmed proficiency and are not specifically made for monks. I also wouldn't make the modal too esoteric. This would again tie the proficiency to monks exclusively. Instead something generic like more damage but slower speed or so would be ok.

Intended. Disengagement attacks only get triggered if you move away wilfully. It was the same in PoE. You can trigger disengagement attacks with Rhymrgand's Visage and other frightening/terrifying effects. Enemies are more likely to disengage you (wilfully) if they are terrified.

In PoE you cancel the casting process when moving - but at least you don't lose the spell use. Why do you lose the spell use in Deadfire even though the spell didn't go off yet? Long casting times and this annoying loss of spell uses is a bad combo.

As a dev/designer, you can ask yourself the following question: if a caster's spells take 6 (9 with recov.) seconds overall and fights last about 15 seconds (normal difficulty) - why would I need more than 3 casts per encounter? Something doesn't fit here... I understand the desire for more tactical depth. But the current approach is just too much. As others said: giving really powerful effects long casting times is ok, but everything else ist just Overkill and makes casters very tedious to play.

In PoE1 Riposte has a 30% chance on graze and 20% on miss (after a patch that buffed it - before that it was 20% on miss only). That's not too powerful but not bad either. A Riposte rogue works quite well - the only problem was the low health of rogues which doesn't synergize very well with getting a lot of grazes (which with a lot of health would be good for retaliation as well). Since Deadfire rogues aren't as squishy anymore and can exploit healing it seems that Riposte as a concept may be stronger than in PoE1 (especially because you can multiclass) - but that heavily depends on the (probably new) mechanics/numbers of Deadfire's Riposte.