Arnegar

I found turn-based to be a big drop in difficulty, too. Not sure what the exact reason is, it's just plain easier. I think a big part of it is the fact that enemies behave differently and will stop in front of your tanks much more readily instead of pouring right past to cuddle your casters. At level 9 now, my druid has taken literally 0 damage. Every fight just pans out the same: combat starts, every enemy runs up and starts hitting my two tanks, and then I calmly kill them with my damage dealers while the bad guys miss and graze the tanks. In RTwP, getting things to stay on your tanks is a much bigger hassle and you routinely have to use doorways and other bottlenecks. In TB they seem to just stick to whomever they first make contact with.

Making speed less valuable could be accomplished just fine by simply reducing the amounts gained from dexterity, items and buffs. Instead we've gone from one problematic extreme to the other. Initiative is of so little value that I'd strongly consider making dex the dump stat du jour. Often I don't even want to act first on the opening round because enemy positioning makes it awkward to do anything but stand back and let them come to the location you chose to fight in. After the first turn, it pretty much stops mattering who acts first. If anything, it's actually better to have your party's turns all at the same time so you can time everything right instead of your turns mixing with enemy turns. As long as you only get one action per round, there's a strategic advantage to stacking your party's turns all in sequence. I routinely use the delay turn button for that reason, meaning everything that affects initiative is 100% worthless to me. Too many of this game's mechanics revolve around action- and recovery speed. Making these stats useless is just too much of a balance upset. If it was a pretty niche thing that wasn't affected by very many things, it would be different, but there's just too many items, abilities and build factors designed around speed. This new action economy system is more primitive than Fallout 1. For all the problems with the RTwP speed system, eliminating speed is a much worse alternative. It's not right that you can have two characters that are identical except one has max dex and one has 3, and they'll perform pretty much the same. That's not better than before where speed was a bit too important.

It's a bit absurd that this frankly gamebreaking bug still exists. It's been months now. There's been a full version update since it got reported and it wasn't fixed. Ship combat becomes borderline impossible with this bug, and all we know is that the report hasn't been closed? Having no control for the first five seconds of the already absurdly stacked ship combat (15+ enemies) makes it a total cluster**** as AI will cause your party to essentially suicide by charging into insane, unrecoverable positions. This is a major bug and it just sits there in a report.

Arcane Archer seems truly awful, like worse than basic no-subclass ranger. The imbued shots aren't very good and you can use so few of them per encounter that it doesn't come close to compensating for the accuracy and health penalties. They don't really scale with the ranger passives and they're just lower-level wizard spells, not even unique abilities. Pretty disappointing. It feels like ten minutes of thought went into the making of this class. At a bare minimum, the bond cost of the spells needs to be halved so you can actually use them more than two or three times per fight. Then get rid of the accuracy penalty and you might be looking at a class worth playing, mostly because the other ranger subclasses present such weak competition.

Are you adding it to the top rows? That's where they actually consume it from. If you just put it in the bigger inventory box, it isn't used.

Shieldbearer of Ecwhatever is way better than the tiny AoE heal from Kind Wayfarer. Rendering targets immortal for 6+intel% seconds is so much more valuable. The sheer mileage you get out LoHing somebody and leaving them unkillable for eight seconds is miles beyond what 15ish heal to two or three nearby characters will accomplish. It's not even close. Often, the character you LoH as a shieldbearer will continue to receive damage and could soak up 50-100 or more damage that would otherwise have killed them moments after the LoH lands. Enemies will continue to attack the character in question, so the effective healing of a Shieldbearer LoH can end up in the hundreds. This isn't WoW where rendering someone invulnerable will cause enemies to stop attacking them. When a Shieldbearer LoHs a target, they simply cannot die for the duration of the buff. You could chain it on the same target to let them soak up all the damage for the duration of a fight. It's a candidate for a nerf. Kind Wayfarer is not.

I prefer to get character to 12 mechanics, and the remainder in athletics for the self-heal, then another character gets 7 mechanics for the +4 party assist bonus. That'll sort out everything. From what I've seen, nothing requires more than 18 and you can use lockpicks for those when you're at 16. If you're stingy, you can stay at 10 on the main mechanics guy and rely on Thief's Putty for the 18 locks. You can even stay at 8 with the +2 mechanics gloves. In short, 18 is as much as you should ever need, and 7 mechanics will give +4 party assist so the main mechanics guy needs 12 without bonuses. I prefer to ignore the gloves and putty and just raise the skill to 12 on one char and 7 on another.

Yeah, you don't see it in the character sheet unless it's a completely plain "+x deflection." It still applies as stated in the tooltip. I'm not sure how the AI interprets conditional deflection effects, though. Plain effects will affect their behaviour by making them less liable to attack someone with high deflect, and I suspect that it goes by the value displayed in the character sheet. This would mean that Arcane Veil does not make you a less juicy target, even though it gives +50 deflect against almost everything. This can be good or bad depending on whether or not you want to be attacked.

Paladin (Shieldbearer) / Chanter (Troubadour) Dump perception and constitution; max intelligence, strength and resolve. Now you've got a character who can just stand around between the front and back lines to intercept anyone who runs past. You don't want this character on the front line both because the low con leaves them a bit frail and because you want them to be able to reach everyone with Lay on Hands. Don't dump dexterity. If you do, your recovery time after actions is so high that you can't react fast enough. However, set this character's attack AI to passive since they're not going to do any damage anyway and you don't want to busy yourself with recovery time from attacking. They just stand there, blocking the way and healing/buffing people. I don't think it's a worthwhile party member, but this is the way to go if you insist on having a passive healbot. Chants: the +10 deflection one and then whatever healing-oriented chant you prefer. You just stand there buffing everyone with your chants and popping LoH wherever it's needed. Use your incantations for heals, resurrects or just summons if nothing else is needed. Alternately, you could also dump resolve and max perception for the AoE paralyze incantation and make it a heal/CC bot, but incantations tend to have a short range and you don't want this character to be up front with dumped resolve. Gear: the AoE heal aura shield from Dark Cupboard, and whatever else. You can put on heavy armor if you didn't dump dex, which means enemies won't so readily beeline for your healbot. You can also choose not to wear heavy armor, which means your heals come out faster when needed, but then this character will need to not have dumped constitution. For a troubadour, I prefer not using the chant modal so you can fit an extra chant into the rotation will full coverage. It's better to get that passive full-party bonus than to get out extra incantations. However, there may be fights where you need a certain incantation more often and can toggle the modal on.

Two-handed melee weapons are kind of underpowered. Whispers of the Endless Paths is pretty strong but that's about it. The reason to use two-handers is if you already have a dual-wielder in the party and they're getting the best two weapons, so the next guy in line has to choose between the best two-hander or the third and fourth best one-handers. That's about it. It means 2h can be worth using, but only by association. And if the dual-wielder is a Devoted who has to stick to a single weapon class, odds are that the two-hander only pays off if there are two dual-wielders ahead of him. If you only have two melee attackers in the party and one is a Devoted, the second guy is better off dual-wielding as well with another weapon class.

It's a good multiclass because the benefits are mostly fire-and-forget, but the class in itself is so bland and inactive. The chants are passive, and you get to cast a pseudo-spell (most of which are weaker than ordinary spells for their level) every 18-24 seconds or something like that. It was the same way in PoE1, but then most classes were pretty simple at that point. The chanter class on its own doesn't lend itself to attacking, all it really brings is your passive chants and then an incantation once or twice per fight. That's pretty miserable design-wise, but it's not underpowered simply because there's a few chants and incantations that are really strong. Whenever I play a chanter, I find that half my talent points are just put into something arbitrary because there's nothing I'll use in that tier. Most chants are completely useless because you can only actually use one or two at a time, so you never really have a reason to use any but the best one or two chants. Incantations all use the exact same resource which is gained too slowly to really let you use an appreciable variety of them. Feels like incantation costs should go down as you level up so the earlier ones eventually cost 1 and can be used with some measure of regularity instead of just sticking with your best one. That turns the chanter into a class that effectively has one active ability. Before the second half of the game where everything becomes so easy that nothing matters, the best use of chanters is to sing the regen or +10 deflect song and then do the AoE paralyze incantation on cooldown. Later they can restore resources and stuff, but at that point the game is so trivial that it doesn't even matter. You pretty much choose between Skald for more paralyzes, Beckoner for more summons, or Troubadour for an extra chant coverage. Nothing else is legitimately worthwhile.

One example is when you have to go back to Fort Deadlight after receiving a letter. FOUR load screens just to talk to an NPC for a moment. Then there's the myriad places where there's a completely pointless exit, like the Imperial Command place. There's a side exit, and if you leave through it, you go out to these stairs that just go up to the upper level. Load screens both times. What's the point? There are stairs inside. Or the Kahanga palace, there's this balcony off the rooftop that has nothing in it, but it's two load screens if you click on it to have a look. It's just such meaningless waste of time, why are there load screens for these tiny flavor areas? When playing this game, I just feel like 25% of my time is spent in load screens or NPC-walking-away wait states where you have no control. There's just too much of it. When you travel to the Gullet, there's like a forty second display of some guy getting thrown in the depths, and it's so slow because you have to watch NPCs move around and speak their lines. I'm all for story, but can we not constantly put the game on pause for extended periods of time every few minutes? Older games had these as well, but they weren't something that happened all the time. We all remember the drudgery of watching Imoen get kidnapped by the wizards in BG2 for the fifteenth time, but then that sort of thing didn't continue to happen every other time you talked to an NPC. I just travelled from Serpent's Crown to Queen's Berth. On the way, I was interrupted TWICE by storybook events where I had to kill some meaningless bandits who lit a house on fire or bullied one of my crewmates. It made the trek across the city take ten minutes for absolutely no reason. Then I set sail for Crookspur, and in that short trip, first my crew wanted to play dice and then they wanted to know if this fish was okay. It's just not something I want to click through sixty times over the course of a playthrough.

Casters SUCK in the first third of the game which is where it's actually difficult. They become powerful later on when everything's so trivial that being powerful barely matters. While the endgame's triviality may change when the difficulty issues are addressed, I'm not convinced it will do much to the dynamic of casters early vs. late. I'm sure it'll still be a lot like PoE was: eventually you get to the point where things just aren't hard (though hopefully not quite as total faceroll as PoE2 is now). If the higher-level wizard spells are nerfed, something needs to be done about the fact that they're pure garbage in the beginning where even a max-perception character will routinely miss 80% of their spells.

Priest is a trash class in PoE2, to be honest. Most of their spells are either single target or have a tiny AoE centered around the caster. They also have long cast times. How am I supposed to buff my whole team with Holy Might when it's a slow cast and has such a small reach that my party has to huddle around the priest? You can't start a fight that way. The priest has one saving grace: Devotions for the Faithful. This is an overpowered spell on its own, made balanced by the fact that the class offers very little else. Priest healing spells are surprisingly awful, and other classes can supply most of the same inspirations as the priest buffs. You just don't need to rely on slow priest spells for it, my other characters can buff themselves with instant abilities that are as strong as most priest buffs. Maybe if fights were longer and priests had better healing, it would be a more worthwhile class. As it is, pretty much anything that a priest offers can be done by a paladin who also gets a bunch of way better stuff and a giant bonus to defenses. With the way buffs don't overlap in this game, a class centered almost entirely around buffs is just not good enough.

There's just too many of these. The load screens get really long, especially until the memory leak is fixed, and they just happen constantly. You're sailing around and some random lore or ship event happens, you click through the pages, and then there's a load screen afterwards. Moving around a city is 50% load screens. Half the areas you click in the world map will come up with some storybook script before letting you in. Sometimes it's to let you search for clues or whatever, but one time it was literally just a cave and then it made me choose between "enter the cave" or "turn around." Nothing else. I mean, really? This is just pure pointless tedium and wasted clicks. Then there's the wait states. You know how, before/after dialogue, the UI disappears and you have to watch the NPC wander away slowly? Often that's ten seconds thrown away for no reason. It just happens a bit too often, so it gets frustrating. These things have their place, but they're too frequent in this game. They especially overuse the storybook scripts. Often it feels rammed in just for the sake of having it. When I click on a zone exit, I really don't need a book to pop up asking whether I actually wanted to travel there or would rather turn back. I already clicked on the exit.