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Arnegar

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Everything posted by Arnegar

  1. Might is most useful when you don't get a bunch of other percentile bonuses. It's additive now, not multiplicative like in beta. If you get like +100% damage from various sources, getting another 24% from might doesn't do that much. Meanwhile, spellcasters don't get many of these bonuses so might's additive damage is very valuable on spells. There's a lot of other minor considerations, though. If you're a tank and trying to manage what passes for aggro in this game, you should not dump your might and perception into oblivion. The way engagement works, mobs will take your attributes into account when calculating whether or not to break engagement with you. If they see that you have like a 20% chance to hit and your blows do 8 damage on average, they won't stick on you. If instead you have decent accuracy and high might, as well as something like Overbearing Guard, they're scared of your disengagement attacks and will be much less liable to wander off and kill your wizards.
  2. Heh. My level 3 evoker landed a 150 crit with the level 1 spell Fan of Flames. Got the racial bonus from my priest's Holy Power, used that amulet you can find that improves your power level, and then empowered a Fan of Flames. It critted something for 150 and hit the rest of the enemies for like 80-90ish. Probably about 400 damage total in a single level 1 spell. This was at a point in time where my other damage-dealers had accumulated a total of like 5k damage, so it was kind of amusing. I'd say evoker has merit outside of empowered spells, it's just that you give up so much utility. You should only run an evoker if you have the control taken care of, say by a skald who spams paralyze all day. If your wizard is just there to do damage and nothing else, the evoker is top tier for the job. It just doesn't function the way a traditional wizard did in PoE1 with all sorts of crowd control. It's pure damage, but it can be top tier for that even if you only use empower reasonably.
  3. Usually when there are so many enemies, they're just xaurips and stuff which you can simply mow down or ignore. There's rarely 5+ seriously dangerous enemies in one place. When there is, you can charm the one or two excess ones. I have had absolutely no problems on PotD using just that one tank, whereas trying to make do with a single paladin or chanter tank is hugely frustrating as enemies will be all over the place and largely ignore the tank. That forces you to have multiple tanks, or at least sturdy melees.
  4. Fighters make great tanks in 3.0 because of Overbearing Guard. With this talent, the AI seems very scared of the fighter's disengagement attacks and will stick to him like glue. It's incredibly effective and has largely revived the original fighter tank. It does require level 7 and two talents that don't directly improve your survivability or anything, but it means you only have to have one tank in the party. Well worth it, it's the only tank I bother to even use in WM2 because it leaves you with so much freedom to build the rest of the party in whatever fashion you want. Edér can do this build just fine, or you can make it a custom companion in which case I recommend pale elf for the elemental DRs. If you make your own, don't skimp too much on might/perception as this will gimp his very valuable disengagement attacks. Since intelligence is of limited importance to such a character, you could even make it a hybrid tank/DPS, although the mob-grabbing potential of this build is so effective that you kinda need to be very tanky. From what I can tell, Overbearing Guard seems to simply prevent enemies from leaving the vicinity of the tank entirely. They'll never take that disengagement attack. Very few things are immune to prone, it's pretty much just oozes and like will-o-wisps.
  5. Barbarians do incredible sustained damage. In most fights, if you could get the data from just the one fight, a barbarian will frequently have done more damage than anyone else. This kind of damage could be perceived as less valuable than focused damage that takes out important targets, but it lets you design the rest of the party to concentrate on that while a single barbarian can take care of the trash. Casters can only do that once or twice per rest, so unless you're willing to deal with PoE's extremely awful supply mechanic to an unnecessary degree, barbarians remain viable throughout the whole game.
  6. Fighters are much better at being durable damage dealers, and investing ability points into engagement, something of very dubious use, instead of something that helps dealing damage and not dying, is a bad idea. For a "pure" tank, I would only use either a chanter or paladin, since they also bring much-desired utility while alive. With the new Overbearing Guard talent, fighters feel incredibly good at holding aggro now, so much so that I feel no need to have any kind of secondary tank in the party when I have a fighter tank. It probably doesn't work quite as well in a melee-heavy party, though, because while Overbearing Guard seems to make the enemy AI terrified of the fighter's disengagement attacks, they're no less likely to turn around and hit someone within reach. But that would be the same for any other tank. The issue with pure tank paladins and chanters is that enemies mostly just ignore them. Having your paladin as a tank also means you have a fairly small window in which to position your backline so that they're close enough for Zealous Focus but far enough for the wood elf accuracy bonus. I prefer my paladin right in the middle with a blunderbuss, where the aura's radius lets everyone move as they please and you can easily reach anyone with Lay on Hands.
  7. It isn't not-viable, but that many melee characters will have trouble actually getting to fight all the time due to space constraint and the game's incredibly bad pathing. You should at least give two of them reach weapons if you want to have four melees. There are so many places in this game where fighting in a bottleneck is hugely beneficial because it allows your tank(s) to take all the hits, but in doing so, I found it difficult to make use of even a single "DPS" melee without reach.
  8. As I said earlier, there are achievement for finishing the game on PotD. LImited supply is part of that difficulty. Someone finishing PotD with access to 10 supply will have way easier time than someone doing it with 2 supply. But it's not difficult. There's literally no element of difficult associated with this mechanic. This is because the game must be designed in such a way that you ALWAYS have the option of going back the way you came to buy more supplies. There simply cannot be any difficulty associated with this mechanic because of this. The game is never allowed to put you in a "now what?" situation, because once you're reduced to 1 health, you can no longer continue and are forced to go get more supplies. People keep talking about supplies being a difficulty feature, but it's not, it's an anti-difficulty feature. Its existence has necessitated that the game be less difficult in order to accomodate it. Even in places where they seem to have tried to impose that "trapped in a dungeon" feeling, like going through the pool to the drake level and having to fight your way out, you can tell that they've erred severely on the side of caution and give you just a few rooms of trash mobs to clear in order to get to the master stairs. There's no difficulty associated with supplies, just a bit of meaningless OOC punishment when you take too much damage and have to waste time leaving the area to buy more supplies. They're infinite at the source, it's not like you can deplete it. There's quite a lot of content in this game that can't realistically be completed without those pointless, tedious return-for-supplies trips, so anyone saying that you just need to get better at the game is simply full of **** and trying to feel superior. No player never gets in that situation where you need to rest and have no more supplies. And when you do, there's no challenge, there's no obstacle to overcome, it's just a waste of five minutes as you effortlessly backtrack and sit through a few loading screens before you're allowed to continue again. Nobody has presented any argument against this that holds any water. It's all just "I don't mind the tedium" or "I'm so good that I don't have that problem, lern 2 play scrubtard."
  9. No, that just makes your response utterly bereft of any merit because it isn't based on any sort of reasoning, just your dislike of an arbitrary thing that has literally nothing to do with the subject. It's about the same as saying "whenever someone makes an argument and I see he's wearing sneakers, I roll my eyes and decide that he's wrong." Well done. You're the definition of unreasonable.
  10. I disagree. It offers an incentive to conserve your resources, precisely because you don't want to backtrack just to get new supplies. If you find yourself going back to town just to get more camping supplies, you're doing it wrong. Most wilderness areas or dungeon levels have at least one camping supply that you can find as loot, and if that is not enough then that's a sign that the area is currently too difficult for you, and that you might be better off exploring another part of the game world first and come back later, or play at a lower difficulty level. No, it doesn't. You can't conserve your health resource. You can't heal health. Once you take health damage, the one and only way to restore it is by resting. It's kind of silly and ridiculous that everyone's just assuming that I'm some newbie who needs to get good. I play on PotD. I beat the game just fine. I'm not struggling with the game's difficulty. The supply mechanic has nothing to do with difficulty whatsoever. Unless you're trying to tell me that you don't take damage when you play, and that everyone should be held to that standard, then you have no point. You, and all but one other poster, seem to have intentionally misinterpreted my point in order to essentially tell me I'm bad. The supply mechanic means every bit of the content has to be designed in accordance with it. You can't have a dungeon that traps you, because then your game is over the moment you run out of health and supplies -- which, with a mere two rests (you have to go all the way down to 'normal' to get more than two, so please don't tell me that's the solution), would be inevitable in content of any real length. There's no element of difficulty in this mechanic. You lose health from combat, by design -- in fact, this game is rather brutal in this regard, with a lot of enemies and abilities that will deal so much damage that rest is an absolute necessity after a certain amount of time. Nobody overcomes this "challenge" to such a degree that they no longer need to rest. You just don't seem to mind that you have to periodically go and buy supplies. What's actually gained by this? The game is entirely beatable, so it's not some kind of difficulty check. If and when you run out of supplies, you have to simply backtrack and get more. Enemies don't respawn, dungeons don't trap you, you're never actually prevented from doing it. The challenge is expressly absent because this mechanic necessitates that you must always be able to do that. If anything, this mechanic removes difficulty and challenge by merit of its very existence. It's pointless tedium. It's a meaningless thing to keep track of, a nuisance that serves no purpose and isn't even realistic.
  11. The party supplies mechanic is inherently flawed. It doesn't present any kind of challenge or decisionmaking, it just occasionally forces you to take a break from playing the game in order to return to wherever you buy supplies. There's no element of difficulty in this. It's simple tedium. Once your health is in the grey, you simply must leave the area and get more supplies. You can't continue, you can't attempt to brave the dungeon anyway. And with an allowance of just two rests per "adventure," this severely limits how long you can be anywhere without returning, and probably limited content design as well. My favourite part of BG2 was when you were thrown into the Underdark to fend for yourself, not knowing when you might get to return to civilization. You more or less had to make do with whatever you had on you at the time. That was really immersive and interesting, and PoE could never do something like that because of this mechanic. Having to return to town every 30 minutes feels like some kind of MMORPG feature. Playing PoE often feels like doing dungeons in WoW: bite-sized and regularly interrupted by the necessity of returning to town purely because the game says so. What's the point? With this health mechanic and such a limited amount of rests, nothing is accomplished besides meaningless return trips that you only need to do because of an arbitrary limitation on party supplies. It isn't even realistic -- your party of six can only carry enough supplies to rest twice (or like four or whatever on easy)? Why? I'm pretty sure that I, right now, could carry enough supplies to rest six or eight times, and I'm neither a barbarian nor a wizard. You'd think they could take better care of themselves. Suggested alternatives: - When out of supplies, you can still rest to recover health but no longer regain per-rest abilities and spells - Party supply pool increased to at least 6 (1 per party member) - You can rest for free outdoors, and the survival skill lets you gather supplies in any wilderness area where it makes sense - I don't know... lembas bread?
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