Boeroer

Elemental spirits (=blights) are for druids. But you are right that the wizard's phantoms seems to have something to do with the elements, too - because they cause shock damage and look like electrical beings. Golems are vessels which seem to be the product of animancy. Look at Galvino's Workshop. As far as I can tell he's no wizard but "only" an animancer. But I could easily imagine a wizard subclass specializing on creating golems, undead, animated weapons and stuff like that - like some of Concelhaut's apprentices did. A lot seems to be possible with magic. But I doubt OBS will do that because it would be a very special subclass and totally different from normal wizard. But who knows?

Sure, all those things need to be balanced. But I'm talking about simple quality enchantments at the moment which won't turn your simple dagger into the best weapon in the game. It's just a way to keep up with the new stuff in terms of quality (fine,exceptional and so on) while putting money and ingredients into it. Because Josh explicitly said that they want to prevent that you enchant your early noob weapon to legendary but are forced to equip a new one. That's what totally puzzled me. Why on earth would you want that? It also keeps players from enchanting until the late game because they don't want to waste resources on stuff they will throw away anyways. He obviously has some reaons to think this is a good thing, I just can't figure out which obscure reasons those might be.

You should elaborate more on that. Because you can still find new and better items with even cooler enchantments. Nobody said they should place less items. Of course it's cool to find new weapons which are better because the area is more dangerous and so on. If you don't want to use enchanting to pimp your existing weapon so that it can at least keep up with the quality level of the new ones you found that's totally OK. But why take away the option (and it's only an option) to pick a fitting weapon for your build and stay with it? It makes no sense in my opinion. You already have the drawback that you have to invest a lot of money and rare resources in order to do so. As I said: makes no sense in my opinion - to cut something that gives you more interesting options and more variety with so little efford. It's like designing low level spells which become obsolete once you get higher level spells. Who honestly wants that?

They want to realize that in PoE2:Deadfire

Yeah right, sorry. For a short time my personal Iselmyr took over.

Yes, I know. I already did, hehehe.

Yeah right. Should be ceiling I guess. But sealing also made sense when I heard it. Blame the fact that english is not my mother tongue. I changed the title.

Persistence is the best bow in the game for dps against single enemies and also because of Predator's Sense Stormcaller is great because of the -6 shock DR, because it works with Heart of the Storm and because of the special procs. Chances to proc Returning Storm go up when you use Driving Flight and Twinned Arrows. I can't say which one is better. It's probably best to keep them both and use Stormcaller against foes who are immune to pierce damage or against groups of mobs - and Persistence against tough single foes. If you like to deal a lot of damage with the pet I would use Persistence as first bow and Stormcaller as backup (if you don't have anyone else who could use it). You can use the Nightrunner armor to gain +15 defense against disengagement attacks and put on boots of speed. That way you can run away quickly without getting killed. You can even put on a Girlde of Mortal Protection. It will prevent that you get one-shotted by a disengagement-crit. As MaxQuest said: for dps it would be best to only wear cloth. You can enchant that with more DR, too.

^this!

...who's trapped in the pasty body of an imbecile who knows nothing and not only has the tourette- but also a drug induced fat finger syndrome? Sorry to hear that. Hope you get better soon.

Sure you can enchant fine weapons. You can pt a secondary damage lash on them, you can upgrade them from fine to exceptional and so on. You're doing something wrong if this doesn't work for you. What you can't do is enchant a fine weapon with damaging or accurate - because fine is already a combination of damaging and accurate. Fine, exceptional and superb and so on as well as accurate and damaging are quality enchantments which are mutually exclusive. But fine, exceptional etc. always beats accurate and damaging.

The button that looks like a bald head and turns blueish if you click on it. Should also have a tooltip that says something about AI. You can also choose different settings for the AI based on the class. Right-click on said button.

What was that? Proving that you are wrong all by yourself?

I know a guy who will try.

Just imagine that you've put together the White Crest armor, including helmet, and the White Spire estoc on your favorite character. And they look so good together that you totally freak out and never want to use other equipment again. And then, after a few hours into the game, you'd have to throw the White Spire into the trashbin because you can't enchant it anymore and it becomes too weak to beat some generic lvl 12 monsters. Sad, sad times!

Right, that would also be an easy solution. But the reduced recovery not only influences autoattacks, but also the primary attacks of special attacks - so for example a monk could spam Force of Anguish a lot faster just because he wears a bashing shield even though it's only a primary attack. That seems to be weird. But it's also the case when dual wielding - so maybe yeah, it might be a good solution.

Hi, in the twitch stream mentioned bove, Josh and Aarik talked about enchantments and that they plan to establish some kind of "sealing" for enchantments on weapons so that it's less likely that you'll keep one and the same weapon from the beginning of the game to the end (because you can't enchant it to the same levels than you can enchant later weapons, it's capacity is sealed). Actually, I totally hate that idea (and I don't use that word often). One of the things I really like about PoE1 is that you can easily find an early unique weapon (or armor) that totally fits your idea of your character build, even if it's not very powerful, but has a good enchantment like marking, wounding, draining or disorienting or whatever.. or only looks supercool, don't underestimate that. And then you can enchant it to higher qualities while you advance in the game. The weapon "grows" and develops together with it's wielder. I think that's a great, great thing to have. How do you fellow forum members think about that?

Sounds like a pretty lame subclass so far. But it all depends on the drugs you can find I suppose.

Yeah, it really is a cool concept. I would love to see a nice, but not too powerful effect when using bashing shields.

It depends how you play the game, when you do what and so on. I hardly felt a difference except with bouties in WMII. Josh already said that the scaling mechanism wasn't too good in PoE1. They might want to install a smarter one in PoE2. Likely in a way that encounters automatically scale a bit with level. Not too much like in Skyrim or Tyranny though.

Hi Josh & Aarik, thanks a lot for answering those questions and feeding us with infos. One thing though: looking through the said video I noticed how you guys answered a question about bashing shields: You answered something like that it's not supposed to be a big dps boost. One should use dual wieldung or two handers for that. A shield is suppoed to give you deflection and not dps. So far, so good, but I think you misunderstood: The thing is that bashing shields reduce the dps compared to normal shields! It seems you don't know about that (which is understandable). Bashing doesn't speed up your attacks - so instead of hitting things with your good and sharp sword every 2 seconds, you will alternate between sword's good damage and the low damage of bashing. You will do less dps than a guy who uses a regular shield! Let me put it this way: If you wield sword & shield and attack 10 times with that sword - it does 10 damage - you will do 100 damage in total, right? Now if you attack 5 times with the same sword and 5 times with a shield bash that does 3 damage, you will only do 65 damage (I made the numbers up to make it plain). In the same amount of time (because unlike dual wielding, using a bashing shield doesn't speed up your attacks) you will do less damage compared to a normal shield guy. The worst thing about this is that bashing also costs you enchantment slots. You basically pay for a dps loss. Bashing must at least cause the same amount of damage as your main weapon if you don't want to produce a dps loss compared to normal shields. This is difficult to achieve and also not very logical. So another way to upvalue bashing would be a stun- or prone-on-crit effect, a small push effect on hit/crit, disorienting on hit (basically like some unique weapons have), dazing or whatever comes to mind which would make bashing useful and not a gimpage. One could also think of an active ability like Knockdown like the Girdle of the Driving Wave has: Knockdown 1/encounter. All those stuff would be plausible and not hard to implement. Some of the PoE1 shields had things like that (or even way better), like Badgradr's Barricade or Dragon's Maw. The other bash shields would have been better if there weren't bashing on them at all. I hope you understand what I mean. Now you surely agree that something has to be done. It wasn't my question by the way. But a good one I think.

I think it's really great they mixed the expansions into the main game. That way you can decide where to go first and that way you can use all the new items and talents/abilities and so on right in the main campain. Upscaling makes sure that encounters don't become too easy. I see only disadvantages if you exclude an expansion from the main game and do like a small sequel instead of a real expansion.

The late bounties like Brynlod's and Magran's Faithful are the hardest encounters by far, but that's because there are a lot of powerful individuals, not necessarily one uberboss. For me it's way more easy to beat the Alpine Dragon than Magran's Faithful but I still think that the Alpine Dragon is one of the most powerful single enemies in the game. One of the most annoying chars for me is the fighter who's among the robbers who stole the crate of the smith of Gilded Vale. I like to do that quest rel. early and that guy has high level abilities like Unbending and just won't die if your level is too low. A neat solution is to lure the trolls to him, but still... a powerful foe. Lagufaeth Broodmothers can be very dangerous and my nemesis if I go to the WM early. Those Cleansing Flames, holy moly.

What do you mean exactly with auto heal? A priest has some spells for healing and there is an AI setting for priests that lets them heal automatically once party members' endurance is low. So, when you turn this priest's AI on you will have kind of auto healing. He also has spells which will emit a healing aura and a spell which will heal a party member once his/her endurance drops to a certain point. If you mean passive auras which heal your party members just by being around then no - a priest can't have that. All his healing powers need an activation. Be it a spell or an active ability. If you want other sources of healing you can look at the chanter (auto healing aura), the druid (healing over time in an area of effect - this sounds like something you're looking for) and the paladin (strong single ally heals).

Still not worth any skill points in my opinion.