Boeroer

For me the hardest fights are Brynlod and also Magran's Faithful. Dragons are quite easy because you can charm or prone or paralyze them easily with a party and the ads are not that powerful but just annoying. The bounties however have a lot of high level casters that can really smash you in seconds if you're sloppy (especially if you choose upscaled content). The druids of Magran's Faithful will shower your casters with Sunbeams like there's no tomorrow and so on. Still not supertough if you're lvl 16 or so, but harder than the bog dragons + Llengrath in my opinion. But yes: the more you advance the easier it gets. Especially with a lot of casters there are no real challenging fights later in the game. The trash mobs you can easily dispatch with your Spell Masteries and in tough fights you can just use all your spells. Try a party without casters (wizard, druid, priest, cipher). That's a bigger challenge. Not necessarily when fighting dragons, but when meeting big groups of high level enemies (Torn Bannermen, Abbey monks, bounties).

You can agree to let Lumdala go if she gives you the name of Lord Gaderman - and when she gave it you can still kill her ("Actually, I have a more dramatic ending in mind").

Frenzy doesn't do anything for reloading time. For a barb, the only things speeding up reloading is DEX, the gunner talent and Sure Handed Ila from a fellow chanter. So the only thing that Frenzy does for a quick switching gun user is to add 4 MIG. Now that's underwhelming. I think if you want to do a ranged barb then guns is the worst decision. With Frenzy, Bloodlust and Blood Thirst you can at least achieve some nice attack speed with a war bow. I tried that and it's still totally meh.

Barbarian an monk are actually pretty bad in ranged combat (besides The Long Pain which works with most of the monk's "melee only" abilities - unlike other ranged weapons). It's a lot easier to build a feasible melee ranger than a ranged barbarian or monk. Even the fighter is not very great at that. Some of his abilities don't work with ranged weapons - but maybe a ranged fighter is comparable to a melee ranger. So if Obsidian's goal was to make classes like the barbarian also suitable for ranged combat they miserably failed. Not that this is a problem for me though - I like barbarians and also monks a lot. Just sayin'...

I would use the eMail address. It's very unlikely that a developer will answer your question here. In the past Aarik D (community manager) was helping a lot, but I guess they are so busy right now with PoE2 that there's not much time for him to look into the forums. It may be that there is a user who can help you though...

Now that's bad. Why would somebody code it like that?

If nothing helps you can unlock the Yenwood map with the console and travel there. Once you approach the battlefield the fight will occur (maybe without any scripted sequence) and after you won the quest will be completed. Even works if you didn't pick up the questline in the first place.

No problem with that. Since English is not my mother tongue I expect them to improve my submission anyway. Also, one can assume that the ledger is used and filled by the same pirate. Some kind of former scribe or so. So all entries should have the same "style", vibe or color of language (however you call it). At least that's what I think is plausible. So maybe some entries will get altered just because of that.

Last time I tried it (2. something) you could cast Relentless Storm several times and observe that the intervals between impact got shorter and shorter. Same with Nature's Terror by the way: you could generate a ton of parallel shocking hits. I did that to determine if retaliation druid + Combusting Wounds (Ring of Searing Flames) was any good - and it was. It may be that this got altered, but I saw nothing about that in any patch note since then, so I think it still works this way. However - two druids casting two separate Relentless Storms is 100% doable. With six druids casting 6 storms you'll have 6*foe-number impacts every few seconds AND your speakers will definitely break. Same with 6 chanters casting White Worms by the way. Crushed my headphones...

Eh... since the animation gets played before the roll is done I really doubt that this is possible with the current approach. The game doesn't look at the enemy, sees its DR values and then decides to use piercing attacks. It just does the attack roll and then determines which DR is lower and then chooses the damage type. This is the easiest solution and thus OBS went for it. I get your idea and it would indeed be nice, but I highly doubt that OBS will implement a routine that decides which animation to play before doing the actual hit roll. It could be done of course - in different ways.

Although the ranger can use some of his abilities in melee in PoE1 (some he can't, like Vicious Aim), the stuff that makes him stand out and makes him powerful is for bows and firearms. So he clearly is focused on being ranged. He can be viable in melee, but it's nothing special and feels a bit generic unless you use very special build ideas ( https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/83435-class-build-riptide-the-pit-fright-dps-offtank-melee-ranger-double-team-supreme/ ). So a subclass that focuses on melee as well as a subclass that has no permanent animal companion are both fine. That leaves two classes (original and another subclass) that might be focused even more on ranged combat. Don't understand why it's a bad thing if players have a wider variety to choose from. Nobody needs 4 ranger classes who are all ranged experts. I would have liked to see a big game hunter as a subclass, having bonuses when the enemy is large and powerful, making better use of traps and using heavy hitting weapons.

He already answered that.

Hi. The Witch Doctor is a lot more powerful in terms of DPS and also more versatile because he can also do good damage in melee, not only ranged. The Prondroni build was an attempt to create a monk who can be played effectively by the AI as well - since normally monks require a lot of micromanaging. And of course the high attack speed very early in the game makes him a good DPS tool, too. But the Long Pain is so powerful that in the end the Witch Doctor will terribly outperform Prondroni. However, since the Prondroni build uses weapons which can be obtained early and concentrates on Force of Anguish he's also a lot of fun that early in the game - at a point where you can't even pick The Long Pain.

I guess it was firkraag888... Also, don't forget Avenging Storm. That spell adds so much to a spirit shifted druid...

Sure you can. You can even have several instances of Relentless Storm active as a single druid.

I guess wizard + barbarian will be totally bonkers if Citzal's Spirit Lance works the same way as in PoE 1. The Lance's AoE attacks combined with carnage would be total overkill. And since paladins can now use FoD up to 11 times per encounter (at lvl 20) it might also be that druid or monk + paladin will be a lashfest.

I guess dragons would have been very tough though (Sky Dragon I did successfully though). Same as the WMII-bounties. You can do them solo on PotD with Combusting Wounds + Heart of Fury, followed by a Vengeful Defeat - but it's a lot of risk. No problem if you can just reload, but with Trial of Iron you don't want to take unnecessary risks.

I did WM I and went over to Act III and died somewhere there. I was already lvl 16 and did all WM I bounties without difficulties. Can't really remember where it ended. I wrote about it here in the forum. Maybe it was in Noonfrost? Or I was trying t get deeper into the Endless Paths? Can't remember... It wasn't a very difficult fight. Just bad luck and a bug.

I guess another thing that will be exploited (at least I will try) is the removal of health. I can imagine stacking a lot of regenerating effects, also with multiclassing so that it will be very hard to kill a character while he can still focus his abilities and stats on offense rather then picking defensive stuff. Another problem will be to balance the stacking of damage modifiers (like rogue + cipher or rogue + fighter) and especially stacking of lashes (monk's Turning Wheel + Druids Wikdstrike burn). I guess a lot of this will get solved with the power source scaling, but I'm 100% sure we will find some ways to break the game in the beta. Think of Battle-Forged + Turning Wheel + Blood Testament + Scion of Flame or Jolting Touch with the same things. Envenomed Strike + Blast or Citzal's Lance or Rot Skulls, Jolting Touch + Carnage, Cipher + retaliation building extreme focus while receiving hits and so on. All of those quite obvious game breakers survived the beta of PoE 1 and some of those are still in the game today.

I can do watercolor portraits, but I usually don't have the time to do them for other people. Well, maybe in September, once my kids go to kindergarden again... Can you imagine: in Romania they have summer holidays from Beginning of July till Beginning of September. Holy moly! I'm kneedeep in watercolor paintings, Lego bricks and princess costumes...

Right. Totally forgot to write about that. I personally wouldn't use a talent point for Untroubled Faith - but of course you can do that to prevent the malus. You could also use a hireling for that priest build. It's not the same as being the MC of course - but at least you don't have to fiddle around with dispositions.

The difference is not THAT big. Wounding only has 5 secs base duration. Of course there's higher DPS with every second you spare, but it also depends on how many hits you can deliver in a given time - for example if you can reach the enemy more quickly (higher move speed) that will have a bigger impact on your DPS than 2 seconds of wounding spared. Or if you can hit faster. 10 INT is totally fine for Tidefall while I'd say it's a bit low for Rumbalt if you don't have quite high attack speed.

I did a barb Ultimate attempt with a max MIG/CON/INT build, dual wielding hammers, that relied on self healing instead of deflection and it worked pretty well. In the beginning you have to cheese, but after some levels it was fun. I got killed by a bug though: Battle-Forged + Watcher abilities or Second Wind (athletics) produces a self hit that can kill you.

Actually I don't know for sure. I know that certain things like Dragon Thrashed from chanter doesn't show up - or the animal companion's damage. So this is not necessarly a problem with DoTs but maybe with things which are not properly "connected" with the character who uses those things. FOr example The Dragon Thrashed is a hazard - like a trap. So maybe that's the reason why it's not counting. Same with the animal companion since it's its own party member. So maybe since wounding is realated to the weapon and works like a lash it does show up. Same with Runner's Wounding Shot. Because otherwise I can't explain the high numbers. How could a simple great sword do more damage than basically the same build who uses Backstab with Tall Grass all the time? You see I mainly used Runner's Wounding Shot as my no. 1 attack skill with Tidefall. I'm pretty sure the damage numbers would be way lower if the game didn't count these things. Usually I don't care about the "statistics" on the char sheet because they don't say anything about the overall usefulness of a character - but this time I thought it was convenient because I wanted to compare 5 different rogues.

I guess zero reloading will not be possible.