nstgc

Oh, sure, I wasn't arguing that is still isn't better to pick one or the other so long as you know you won't be moving in and out of melee; rather I was saying that the VAST disadvantage you pointed to involving full attack abilities doesn't apply. Not quite since some ranged weapons bring with them a deflection penalty.

Why? Because at range you're still only going to fire the gun/wand in one hand, and in melee you will only swing the weapon you have in the other. Dual wielding two ranged means you'll be firing two weapons at range, swinging two weapons in melee, and every active ability that says they are a Full Attack means that you attack with both weapons during the active ability. Examples: Flames of Devotion and most rogue abilities are Full Attack. If it says Primary attack then it is only your main weapon that does the damage. So, a guy holding two pistols using an ability that does Primary attack will only apply the ability with his main hand pistol. Backstab works like this, and it is why two handed weapons work better for it. Although, one handed style isnt bad either. So, a pistol and a sword dual wield means you fire a little faster, but all those Full Attack abilities will work like Primary Attack abilities using the range weapon at range and the melew in melee. One handed you gain about 12 accuracy plus if you take the One Handed talent convert like 20% of hits to crits. I cant remember if it's 20% off the top of my head. So, you fire slower, but you will hit a lot, and get a possibility for crit conversion. If you crit you will get over penetration, and do much more damage. So, damage wise dual Wielding 2 melee, or 2 ranges comes out in the lead. I would say one handed style is next in line, but two handed is close. The critting from one handed and the damage it can do makes it for me, and the attack speed of two handed makes me sad. Then last comes dual Wielding a mix of ranged and melee. It attacks faster than one handed, but not enough to overcome the accuracy bonus of one handed or the damage of two handed. It also has a benefit of not sitting through weapon swap recovery, but that still isnt enough for me. This is an excellent point, but a bit moot for casters (namely Ciphers I figure). They lack full attack abilities, so the huge gulf you describe doesn't apply.

The weapon abilities aren't meant to be anything other than situational. Take the club's for instance. You don't want to have that on much at all, but for one hit, it gives a -25 Will debuff. Which is great. Toggle, hit, toggle. In case of pen modals, there will be situations you want it, but most of the time you want it off. As far as I can tell none of them really shine as "must have" abilities so its not as if they are competing against other things. For example, my gripe with summoned weapons. They compete with other class stuff. Not only do they require 3s casting (vs the weapon modal's instant with no recovery time), but you have to choose that spell over pretty much everything else (instead of choosing one situational weapon modal over another situational weapon modal).

Obsidian clearly means to curb cheating in their single player game. Not only does the console disable achievements, but modding is greatly hampered in comparison to their previous games, and the save files are obfuscated, maybe even encrypted.

Don't you need to switch weapon sets, which requires a recovery period?

I agree on the Spirit Lance and the Minor Blights, although given just how good unique gear is I think even they are of dubious worth. However unless I made a mistake with my testing I can say the Warding Staff is garbage. When you cast it it does a point blank AoE push back/knock down, but after that it's just a scaling quarterstaff with no other special properties. The weapon itself is strictly worse than the Parasitic Staff. So unless you really value the AoE knock down it's a complete waste of a high level cast. It also gives deflection. I think?

It seems like an AI problem. They won't need to actually nerf it. I too have taken advantage of it, but for the most part avoid doing so.

The one I linked to. No part of my melee caster build REQUIRES summoned weapons so I just do with out them. I just wanted them because the concept is awesome.

In a subject verb object questioning sentence, you get a form of 'do' before the subject. And after a use of do/does/did, you always get the infinitive. So 'say', in this case. -> "Why did Josh say they are very powerful? Specifically considering all the cool new loot we got in-game." Seriously? Her post came across as pedagogic to me. *shrug* Yes. I go into detail as to why at least the Parasitic staff is so bad, but you don't need to dump your whole build. Use the build, but also use normal weapons. That's what I had to do as well. I planned on using light or no armor plus buffs and only summoned weapons, but reality dashed that out the window. The rest of the build, however, is quite fun. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/97800-hierophant-advice-wizardsoul-blade-or-beguiler/ https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/98587-concelhauts-parasitic-staff-worthuse-for-it/

I'm not sure about a half second cast time. As mentioned, the spell can take the place of a weapon swap out (at the expense of potentially awesome weapons, and a spell slot). Certainly 2s is the far end of useful for anything other than fringe cases. Even then, it still would mostly be better to do something else. Given the number of wizard spells you can learn, fringe cases isn't good enough.

Transcendent suffering probably just doesn't scale linearly with power level. I spent a bit of time trying to find the connection between power level and its effects on spells. I didn't do much, but I did find that it's actually the DIFFERENCE in power level that matters. So a level 1 spell gets a 5 step bonus if your caster has a power level of 6. Another thing, which I didn't follow up on, is that I felt that different spells scaled differently with PL. I would need to go back and look at them again to make sure I wasn't mistaken, but that was my impression.

First off: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/98587-concelhauts-parasitic-staff-worthuse-for-it/ My thread also talking about this. I don't know how good later game gear is (my current game is badly bugged, plus I'm waiting for them to fix the import bugs before making a new game) but I can say there is a case for the Citzel's Lance, and the K's Minor Blight. I'm pretty sure the Warding Staff is also decent, but I haven't looked in to it in any real depth. my biggest complaint is the cast time. I'd rather spend the 3 seconds doing ANYTHING ELSE in most cases. edit: Also, poking around inside the bundles, it looks like it will be a total pain in the ass to mod this game vs PoE1.

Nice! Didn't know that, but glad I do now. As mentioned before, its nice being able to quickly switch between ranged and melee in certain builds, and this would allow for that while also allowing for a nice juicy bonus.

Before someone says "here let me Google that for you" I tried that. I know the know stacking rules and they are essentially the same as PoE1. That said, from reading this and that I found myself under the impression that inspirations "stack" by upgrading. meaning if you have Fit, and something else gives you another Fit, while both effects are going you are not fit but rather Hardy or Tenacious, or whatever the next step up is. So you still have +5 CON, but in addition to the CON you also get extra armor. Could someone confirm this? Or tell me that I'm totally wrong. i tried testing this, but all I was able to show is that if you double up on the SOURCE of the buff, it just refreshes the duration. I was not able to test this with two different sources. I have read that inspirations downgrade afflictions (and vice versa), but I have not confirmed this myself.

Its not an OP min-max build, but its very viable. At least so far for me. The wizard provides defense, and you don't need to pick up CMP. Even then you can go "Rarg! Hunk smash!" for a while to build up focus then when the buff ends you can one hit something with SA.

I think this matters more than anything, but functionally, you don't need to deal with the recovery time from swapping weapons.

Or, more significantly, penetrating when an attack might not have (-75% ==> -0% is a huge leap)

I've seen summoned weapons mentioned in a few places, and I love summoning my own armory -- buffs for defense and conjured weapons. While the defensive buffs look great, I'm disappointed with the conjured weapons; at least the ones at the top and bottom rungs (Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff and Citzal's Enchanted Armory). For level 1 spells I want to cast Spirit Shield so I don't die or interrupted. That leaves one casting left. If I have a choice, I'd rather choose Eldritch Aim or Arcane Assault. The former has the same cast time as CPS, and the former has a short cast time and a 4s CD, but dazes and deals raw damage in an AoE. The staff itself scales up to, I'm guessing, the top tier quality enchantment (fine, exceptional. . .) and has some mysterious health drain that doesn't seem to actually do much (20% of melee damage as health, which isn't actually explained). The healing granted by the staff is less than the damage prevented by other means. It can be argued that at higher levels you won't be using the other level 1 spells, however there is still the cast time. This can be sped up by 25%, but 15% of that is from a separate ability that you'd have no use for if you aren't summoning weapons. Kolokath's Minor Blight (minor? there is only one spell like it) is definitely useful. If you're going to need/want to change to another weapon anyway (ineffective due to armor/immunity), you may as well cast this. Citzel's Spirit Lance is also nice due to its AoE. The thing with the staff is it brings, effectively, a defensive buff to the table, but it is the worst possible option. The only reason I can think of to cast it is if you are a ranged (normal) wizard and find yourself suddenly in melee and. . .want to hit things. No, even then I can't think of its use. If this was a pen and paper game I'd absolutely take the spell since so much can go wrong; DMs aren't restricted to game engines, and you can find yourself without weapons or armor. But this isn't a P&P game where you need to be prepared to everything. As for Citzel's Enchanted Armory, I haven't looked at it too closely, but it seems lack luster. I don't intend on playing a pure wizard so I don't really care. It may be my perspective is wrong. I'm looking at this from two angles. First, the melee caster I'm making (Soul Blade + general wizard) which is simultaneously tanky and squishy (yeah, not sure how that happened), and the other is as someone who has played traditional casters for a long time in all kinds of games (ARPGs, CRPGs, P&P RPGs, TBS, RTS, and yes you can play with a caster's mind set in strategy games). So perhaps there is some alternate mind set that I'm missing. Or perhaps some detail.

I actually found it a bit pointless, at least up to level 5, to cast the Staff. It uses up a spell slot and has a lengthy cast time. Also, it's bugged in my game and doesn't seem to actually heal. I would suggest going club instead so you can brain things so your spells stick better (-25 Will for several seconds). But yeah. The general idea is to buff with wiz and then use Soul Blade to actually deal damage, though Arcane Assault is VERY nice due to its low cast time and ability to daze. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/97800-hierophant-advice-wizardsoul-blade-or-beguiler/

I didn't think Monks really synergized well with weapons?

I'm in some temple on my way to that big city after getting the ship repaired. On the second floor full of cave beetles and things that spawn them I found that one character was flanked everywhere even out of combat as can be seen in the first picture. In the second picture we can see that Eder is also flanked despite facing only a single enemy. I had another Screen shot that shows that its not just an icon showing when it shouldn't, but rather you can mouse over the character to see that indeed the penalties are being applied. Restarting the game and loading a save does not fix this, nor does changing areas. Moving too and from the world map doesn't fix it either. I'm even flanked when on my boat. Also the place is Oathbinder's Temple. Resting also doesn't make it go away. I'm stuck flanked for the rest of the game?! I tried uploading my saved game, but the forums say I don't have permission to do that, so I renamed it .zip. Lina (e17153e9-8f22-4886-87e1-9dba4bf5dc37) quicksave.zip

So far, in my experience, the AI prioritizes squishies. Making them melee is saving the enemy the effort of coming to them. I'm playing a tanky caster (lost of buffs) and they still prioritize the Watcher, so maybe its actually based on class (my character is the tankiest).

I know how to go from world map to deck, but I want to land and disembark so I can go elsewhere in the world. How do I do this?

Crit also adds along with all other damage modifiers that I know of. So far things stack like they did in PoE1.

I reforged the blade in PoE1 but I'm not seeing anything about it so far. Do you find it washed ashore or something? Check inside your ship's cabin. Err. . .