FacesOfMu

Ideally, all six spendable point lots could be separated into resettable services. The player could choose to refund any of the points spent in: Utility Skills, Active Skills, Passive Skills, Active Abilities, Passive Abilities, and Weapon Proficiencies. The cost to do each could be a portion of the regular reset fee per character level, plus some, and each time a point pool is reset then the price goes up. I suggest being able to reset Active and Passive Abilities separately because sometimes you just want to release the points spent on the left or right side of the table while keeping the others the same (saves mousing over and reading every little icon again and again). Points reset from one side would be free to be spent on either side. All in all it'd make customising characters based on gear we come across and new things we learn about skills and foes a lot more sensible and bearable.

I checked the mod page again and saw further down the screenshots of the changes. The mod looks like it does a lot of fantastic improvements, though it doesn't do the thing I hope for which is put the affliction and inspiration tooltip text in brackets inline with the name in the original tooltip. My fingers are crossed that either Obsidian or the creators of that mod can make this informational change. Cheers!

Oh man that mod goes above and beyond what I could have hoped for. Thanks, Night Stalker. It's a pity it's needed though. POE and POE 2's interfaces have been top quality otherwise, and it's things like this that can moderate how hooked players can feel to the events of combat.

I've played through POE twice and now about 20 hours in to POE 2 and I'm still finding it difficult to get my head around the new afflictions and inspirations system. I like how they're all grouped into the main stats and can be cured or cancelled out with the opposite effect within the stat group. Even after my hours of playing, I struggle to place value on any of them that don't have an overt combat effect (damage, stun and paralysis, etc). I'd be impressed if any player could remember the effects of all 18 afflictions and all 18 inspirations. Part of the problem is needing to click on the word to see the effects it has, the other part of the problem is not then being able to click on the stat it affects to get a reminder of what that stat does (affliction and inspiration tooltips only provide a little overlay window where the stat words like "Resolve" and "Dexterity" aren't highlighted for clicking). This is particularly annoying and limiting when levelling up characters and choosing abilities. My suggestion, to help new and old users alike, is to add a setting option to make the text of the affliction and inspiration tooltips to show inline inside parentheses. For example, the Priest ability Blessing would show in the tooltip: Friendly AoE: Insightful (+5 Perception) for 20.0 sec That way, the stat can be moused over or clicked on for more info, making it easier for new players to comprehend abilities, understand these mechanics, and learn better play styles. Experienced players can turn it off and play as it is. It sounds like such a small thing, but for the user experience I think it would mean a lot in terms of getting involved in character builds and combat factors, and truly appreciating all the skills that do something other than hurt or heal. Cheers!

I find one of the hardest decisions in games like POE is deciding weapon proficiencies. I find the decision is always made well before you get a feel for the playstyle of each character and well before any of the powerful weapons appear. In POE2, powerful weapons that get more powerful with enchantments seem to come along quite often, and I don't have the game funds to pay for respecs everytime I want to upgrade my primary slots. Even if I did, the more prohibitive factor is resetting all the other level up points that made my character feel right. Honestly, there's plenty of times (and weapons) where I would gladly pay half the re-spec fee just to pick a different set that would make use of the next best gold weapon. Can you please look at separating the respec of these two systems? That way we can have more fun tailoring our characters to the gear that comes up, even if it costs half or more in respec fees.

Not sure if you forgot to credit me for Cipher + Priest = Inquisitor or you had this idea as well. Yup, you're right. My apologies Hilfazer

An Amazon Amazon! Stretchgoooooooooooal!

I found the biggest problem in PoE was having money to spend but not remembering WHO had WHAT and WHERE they were. I posted a suggestion in the PoE threads once suggesting a NPC for the fort who would give you access to all merchants you've visited before and for a time delay plus additional fee you could order anything from across the land. For the conditional merchants (accessed only at night, etc), then the NPC can just remind you of the condition and that you will have to go see them yourself or pay an even higher fee to their access. Frugal players will use it as a reminder of where the stuff is and will go travelling for it, less frugal players will just order in. Win/win.

I had great fun reading this thread and picking out the names that captured the multiclasses beautifully. Here's my own shortlist with refs to the originators. The blue cells appear to have been said by Josh. Direct references are followed by a dash, inspirations are in parentheses, and the rest are my own. I'm really hoping the devs aren't setting their announced titles in stone just yet! Edit: Cipher/Priest: Inquisitor - Hilfazer

Anything that helps the Wizard class be more of a spellcaster and less of an elementalist is good flavouring in my opinion. Compared to many other titles out in the last few years Obsidian is leading the pack and deserves awards and accolades for their class crafting for the Wizards and their magic systems. I'm all in favour of adding more non-combat utility and expression of the Wizard, and encouraging the Wizard to be a battlefield tactician and commander when it comes to combat options.

Mostly in the sense that four is arbitrary and loreless. Four spells per tier doesn't seem to dovetail with grimoire swapping, number of casts per rest, number of spells available, or anything really. It's possible to make grimoires much more interesting for us.

Any experiences would be great to hear about!

I agree with you about making the player's activities meaningful. Most things other than an auto-attack should be meaningful, and even then auto-attacking is a fall-back when resources are depleted. You already know that in challenging fights we select which skills to use based on a good number of variables. OR we pick some damaging spells and spam them because the spells aren't differentiated enough. This is a problem of spell design, but also that the Wiz could gain more meaningful things to do in combat other than conserving spells for future fights that may not happen (due to resting before hand). You summarised my suggestions to "wizards aren't very fun a lot of the time because I want to be casting lots of spells all the time, let's make some changes.". When you write that, I feel like the point you want to make is about flaws in my character, motivations, or execution. Is that what you intended, Tigranes? It'd be fairer (and kinder) to sum it as: Or if you insist on simplifying further: "I had an okay time playing Wizard in POE and I can picture a way it could be funner. I've come to the forums to suggest this idea and hear what others think and support their ideas in an open, polite conversation of thoughts and creativity".

Wondering what would be the funnest single class party? How many of you tried this? A few by now, I'd reckon! Quote this template to give share your experiences, to hypothesise their funness, or to say how you'd differentiate the 6! A party of 6 Barbarians: A party of 6 Chanters: A party of 6 Ciphers: A party of 6 Druids: A party of 6 Fighters: A party of 6 Monks: A party of 6 Paladins: A party of 6 Priests: A party of 6 Rangers: A party of 6 Rogues: A party of 6 Wizards:

I managed to get through this scenario and saved both people with Grieving Mother somehow. I don't have the darndest clue how she did it, but I had so much more admiration for her afterwards! As if I wasn't already her fanboy. I don't remember getting a ring though...?

It'd be nice if it used the character stats to determine this somehow (like characters with <10 int/perc will attack charmed allies), but we'd just micro manage this away. It'd only be a tasteful development for foe AI.

I had a similar issue with Pelegrina before WM. I posted a ticket in the Technical Support forums and they asked for a copy of my save files and such. There's a number of other threads about this sort of issue in the Tech Support. Look for "can't recruit party" and similar tickets. Supposedly there was a fix back in April, but I don't think this bug has been truly eliminated, or something keeps recreating the same symptoms.

I see a lot of interesting comparisons of battles that are "trivial" to those that aren't. I'm not sure when a lot of this happened in WM, but I do know that Cragholdt had mostly "non-trivial" battles, whereas most of WM, even though it was meant to be scaled-up to my >12 party, had some trashier mobs. I did Cragholdt first after getting the expansion before knowing it was meant to be more of an end-game area. I struggled a lot with those mobs, and I'm not entirely sure how much my strategy relied on my PE skills. If anything, I probably tried to save my PR spells too much, and tried to PE my way through before dying a few times and realising my tactic (and spending of camping kits) needed to change. I'm not entirely sure whether I'd prefer that the rest of WM had the same difficulty (when appropriately scaled to your party's level). Shouldn't that degree of intensity, problem-solving, and strategy be more common throughout a well designed game? I'm not talking about Concelhaut (who I tried about 10 times before finding my winning strategy), but the general map mobs. How would not having PE spells have changed your play through? How would ALL PE spells have changed it? How would having a smaller subset of the earlier tiers as PE changed things (like suggested above in this thread)?

I hate to break it to you, but PoE wizards are already D&D sorcerers as is, with the minor caveat that PoE wizards get less known spells per level than D&D sorcerers but have the ability to switch their known spells thanks to the grimoires. In fact, PoE priests and druids are also D&D sorcerers, but with all the advantages (the ability to cast any combination of spells of any level as long as they have the necessary resources) and none of the drawbacks (their spell selection isn't limited). As someone who doesn't like that wizards can select new spells on level up, I can see a very simple solution to that problem My ideas for wizards : - Make spells per-encounter at an earlier level but graduate their progression. For example, start with one 1st-level spell slot which becomes per-encounter at level 6 and go from there. - I like the metamagic proposed by the OP. - I'm absolutely opposed to the idea of making every spell of a certain level known by the wizard available to him once he is high-level enough! Plus, I don't think this is realiitically going to happen, Adam and Josh apparently believe that priests and druids have way too many abilities available for each encounter, this would just create the same thing for wizards. Making per-encounter spells available earlier is a move in the right direction, but making it one slot at a time (or more) would kinda railroad Wizard-play into using those few per-encounter spells as much as possible until there's a wider variety. I know I'd be hard-pressed to step away from those one or two per-encounter spells for most of the game. Freeing up spell casting is still a good towards more fun gameplay. As to druids and priest having way too many abilities, do you remember where they said this? I'm wondering what it is about those abilities that make them seem too numerous to Adam and Josh (Too repetitive? Too many variations? Too powerful? Not enough power? etc)

The having to re-purchase all of your spells is a limitation of how the re-leveling works. I don't see how they would fix it unless they somehow flagged your spell picks and did not allow you to pick any spells at all during a re-spec level up. They clearly track the spells you know and whatnot in the game. There should be someway to archive how many spells you know, perhaps doing so in the moments before you enter character generation and do the respec, and simply letting you choose that number of spells. That would be in line with the whole idea of a respec in letting you redo your whole spell list. Of course I'm not a game designer or programmer of any sort. For all I know this is literally impossible. Yup, tracking whether you've scribed a spell before is toggling a boolean flag per spell, at least. I can't perceive programmatic need to not record this data and stop double charging scribing costs.

Thanks, Heijoushin. I appreciate your big picture perspective. I agree with you on this one, too, Doppelschwert. The fighter classes leave a lot to be desired, too. I hope you can still see the value in this suggestion, even if it is less priority?

I think I can understand your viewpoint. I'm interested to know your thoughts on the 8,10,12 per-encounter bonus?

There's some chat already on making Wizard spell casting and strategy more fun for the player here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/82035-i-have-so-many-grimoires-img/ http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/81222-wizard-grimoires-why/ http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/81221-wizard-grimoires-why/ (mistaken duplicate, but with additional chat) To sum: - Wizard, Druid and Priest spellcasting just gets more fun for the player after level 8 with casting per encounter. And then even better every two levels. Don't argue, it just does. - For whatever reason, Druids and Priests get all their spells per tier available. Wizards pick 4 per tier per book. - Myself and other players never bothered to switch a grimoire in my entire playthrough. I believe this means the Wizard gameplay design wasn't inspiring enough to cause us to want to switch grimoires and therefore experience more of the Wizard spell pool available. - Wizards have 30% more spells available, but little incentive to switch and use more of them. Different quality spell books One strong call for change peoples have mentioned is enhancing grimoires in some way to vary their quality. Better grimoires would offer more slots at each tier. Maybe it doesn't need to be a linear increase per tier. Some tiers could have more or less than those above and below. This would create more variety in the spellbooks you get off parties of Wizards you fight, rather than them all containing the same spells and slots. Metamagic enhancements to spell stats Ymarsakar brought up the idea of metemagic boots from DnD: "... a way to metamagic boost stuff using spell levels or using higher spell levels to give lower spell slots back (tactically useful with some spells)." So one way of creating books of differing quality is for a small minority of spell slots to give metamagic enhancements to the spell you slot to them. Some examples are that one slot makes that slotted spell twice as fast, one slot makes that spell have x1.5 range, one makes the spell foe-only, one increases the crit damage multiplier by .1, etc. If these seem too powerful, then they can be matched with a weakening stat (x1.1 range and x0.9 damage, whatever). More casting per battle The big suggestion here, on top of these ideas, is to make all grimoire spells 1 cast per encounter. Too often in POE we don't excerise the fullness of our spellcasting class because we are always holding on to powerful spells "just in case the boss in next". Sadly only the Wizard, Druid, and Priest really sit with this feeling of being held back. All other classes get a good number of skills that are per-encounter, and they have them from early on. And we know Ciphers and Chanters are powerful (and liberating) in how they recycle their skill currencies. Bringing more of that level 8-12 play experience to the rest of the game is a very good thing, and can always be balanced in the numbers where necessary. One limiting factor is that Wizards won't always be abundant with the most powerful spells. The Wizard is not guaranteed to get 4 slots per tier anymore, and Wizard enemies aren't guaranteed 4 slots at the highest tier (1-2 would be more normal). Wizards will not always be flush with the best spells in one book. Having a variation on the numbers of spells slots per tier in your book (anywhere from 0 to n), and being able to cast every spell in any battle (but only once!), would increase the chance that we'd keep a second or third book on hand that had a different array of slots and metamagic enhancements. It would also mean the devs wouldn't need to struggle with keeping low level spells as usable as high level spells. If every spell can only be cast once, then low level spells won't be as unbalanced as they can be now (with 7 casts of slicken, fireball, etc). Low level spells can still be made decently powerful as long as they suit your strategy for being cast at whatever stage of the battle is necessary. Rather than casting your favourite spell 7 times (I loooooved my Tier 3 Minoletta's Bounding Missiles! It was such an easy, mindless, spam spell), you will look closely at the foe's resistances, see what you've got prepared (or in other grimoires) and figure out which order to cast them. For example, low lightning DR might mean casting Lightning when they're far away, Jolting Touch when they're near, then what??? You can't just keep casting Favourite Spell X against foes, you'll need to think better on ways to play your spells, and play them in an order for maximum strategy. You might think "but I'd just cast high level spells alone!" You may only have 1 or 2 slots in your book for that tier, and you may have given up books with more slots because you liked the combination of blank slots and metamagic slots in this book. Also, high levels spells exist because they meet more scenarios, whereas lower level spells should be more specific. For example, Ninagauth's Freezing Pillar is a great Foe-only AOE DOT freezing spell. To compensate for these great features, it's range, damage, duration, etc, are modfied in such a way that it is better than, but still comparable, to say Noxious Burst (Tier 3 Friendly-fire AOE DOT corrosive spell). If all spells in your slots are available per encounter, but only once each, then you still work to the strengths of the spells vs the weaknesses of your foes vs the particular conditions and battlefield layout at the time the spell is cast. This last point about high/low level spell balance isn't a suggestion from this post; this is game design 101. Then what happens at level 8-10-12? The final comment is the per-encounter change that happens at level 8, 10, and 12. In this case, rather than make spells per encounter (as they do now), every spellbook you equip will behave as if it is slotted with all your known spells at that tier. So at level 8 you may be casting from a book that gives you 3, 4, or 5 slots at tier 1, but the new enhancement would make your tier 1 be flush with all the spells you know at tier 1. When you go to edit your spell book, you will still only see the spells you've slotted (so that you can make use of metamagic slots, etc), but when you bring up the spellbar in combat, all your known spells for that tier will show. So at level 12 you can cast all your tier 1, 2, and 3 spells that you know, but once per encounter. When you hit the 8, 10, 12 marks, you can also worry less about how many slots each spellbook gives you at the lower tiers and you can trade for books with a better distribution of slots in the mid and upper levels. AI for companions would also be easier as there'd be no need to worry about "use per rest" skills except other abilities and items you've given them. There'd also be a lot of room for creating new class talents based on this. For example, a talent that gives every spellbook you hold a +range metamagic slot at tier x, or adding a x1.1 damage multiplier on wider AOE metamagic slots, etc. With this system, Wizard players and Wizard managers will have a LOT more fun knowing they can use up all the spells available, and will still think as hard about which order to cast the spells to get the most use out of them, and will be examining foe weaknesses to figure out which spells will do the most damage and when to cast them, and will be delighted to find spell books with better combinations of slots and metamagic enhancements, and will have a bit more incentive than they do now to try swapping grimoires and managing a strategic library of powerful spells selected from the large pool given to them.

This is probably not a bad idea until they change the relearning "feature". Keep 4 spare grimoires that hold all the spells and get rid of the rest. As to the OP: Very good gif. Love it And it may not be respeccing you want them for. You might be inclined to create a full Wizard party, or some other such inventive strategy that requires making more Wizards. Even now I'm kinda wondering whether it's possible to make such a party where all Wizards cast the same spell once per combat, but a different spell per combat, in a test to see if you can clear out an entire dungeon without having to rest once (so in effect, choose one spell per fight that all your Wizards try to wipe out the entire group with with one cast each, then rule a line through that spell and move on to the next mob. Only rest is back at the inn!).

An alternative to making all spells unlimited casts per battle, they could be made 1 cast per encounter. You might try sticking to one constant rotation, but based on foe resistances, spread, and all the usual combat variables, the Wizard will need to plan out the best order of spells. And yes, many spells may need to be rebalanced or diversified in damage type, target, range, etc. That's necessary anyway.