Loren Tyr

But if reach wm1 you can get one hat that gives -2 to int and reach 1 And isn't there a drug that gives you -4(?) INT? Blacsonn ? Or the new Carow Golan? I saw something... Hmm, you'd think one of them does, I'll check tonight. And perhaps even better, one might give an INT penalty as drug crash. In combination with the WM1 hat that should indeed get the job done, gives a nice MIG and CON bonus too. And the Dandy Hat of the Diseased Yak, pre-Stalwart... it'll be glorious! Though I'd have to use a hireling for this of course, he'd be to dumb to speak so not much of a protagonist. Of course this is contingent on the possibility of stats even becoming negative in the first place, can they?

Hmm, that is rather puzzling, though I recall having seen some mention of similar issues before. It is quite possible (also given how effects are implemented) that when the Knock Down activation coincides with the Consecrated Ground pulse the Knock Down effect gets applied to that pulse as well; it is a bit odd in that case that it would then affect additional enemies as well, though presumably that is explained by each effect individually checking whether it applies to a given target in the pulse AOE. I'll see if I can replicate this tonight (might be tricky to get the timing right though). In the meantime I would also suggest that you run the game file validation thing in Steam (provided you are using Steam, obviously), it might also be that there's just a dodgy game file in your installation somehow. For some reason the Necrotic Lance seems to be behaving like a beam, hitting everything in the path from caster to target (that's what I gather from the screenshots at least; Edér's the one wearing the Stag helmet, right?). Only plausible reason I can think of why it would do that is game file corruption of some kind. By the way, the two Knock Downs in succession is normal if you're dual wielding, since Knock Down (and many other such abilities) apply to a full attack. You can see in the combat log that the damage type is also different: one Knock Down was with your main weapon, the other with the Larder Door.

Except it does affect their experience, because it makes their fighter vastly more powerful than it's supposed to be and the game becomes unbalanced in terms of general difficulty and in the relative performance of different classes/characters. Your argument is a bit like saying it doesn't matter if someone has paralyzing halitosis as long as he himself doesn't know about it. His ignorance won't change the fact that it is liable to affect his social experience.

Indeed. When you look under the hood there are actually two distinct kinds of DoT, with different implementations. You have the OnTick DoT, which is specified in terms of base damage per tick and base duration. This will benefit from INT, since it'll give you more ticks (including a fractional tick at the end, depending on total duration). This is usually the type of DoT used, for example Deep Wounds or Necrotic Lance. The other type of DoT is the fixed damage DoT which is specified in terms of the total damage and base duration. This damage is smeared out over (full) three second ticks, so you're actually better off with lower duration. There's also a bit of rounding going on, so the final damage might be higher than it says: you get a full tick every three seconds, but each one does damage equal to 3 / (total duration) x (total damage) . So if the duration is 4 seconds, you get two ticks worth of 0.75 x (total damage). Note by the way that for this latter type the behaviour is a bit different for Raw damage and other damage types. For raw damage abilities like the wounding shots the DoT damage is taken as a percentage after DR. But for example the Goldpact Knight one, which is 50% of damage as Fire damage DoT, this is based on the damage before DR is applied, like lashes. Each tick is deducted 25% of Fire DR though (which means that higher INT actually results in less damage). I actually toyed a bit with this for an intensely stupid Goldpact Knight (he had his own private aura ). Wasn't satisfied with it it at the time, but I'm of a mind to try it again with a Gunadin-type build. Still need a way to hit that 4 second sweet spot, but can't go for -2 INT unfortunately.

They are making a new game, though. Obviously it is going to build strongly on PoE 1 but it shouldn't be a glorified expansion pack; them having to expend considerable time on class design shouldn't be an argument against it. Besides, switching to one per encounter would still require them to completely rebalance the spells as well. For example, in such a system there would be no incentive not to open every smaller encounter with a barrage from highest level spells down to lowest wipe them out, I don't think that would be desirable. Ciphers and Chanters are naturally balanced against this because they need to acquire enough resource to use their (highest level) spells, and can't just let rip in a continuous stream of spells either because their resource runs out. Obviously, a mage resource doesn't have to be called 'mana', I just had to call it something. But if well-designed I don't think there should be any risk of different resources feeling interchangeable. I never played the Diablo games, but I imagine the reason they felt interchangeable is that they were mechanically mostly the same? I mean, if they were as distinct from each as Wounds/Chants/Focus in PoE you shouldn't have that problem; if hypothetical mage/priest/druid resources are mechanically different, that should work fine. By the same token, I would argue that the 'per rest' vs 'per resource' isn't by itself necessary for distinctiveness. Ciphers/Chanters/Monks are different from the 'per rest' casters in that respect, but they are also distinct from each other (whereas Mages/Priests/Druids aren't nearly as much, and mostly by their spells rather than by mechanical differences). It should be no problem to maintain that distinctiveness if Mages/Priests/Druids are switched to 'per resource' as well (and maybe make those three internally more distinct from each other in the process). Anyway, it might well be that they stick to 'per rest', but then they really would need to come up with a good way to increase the drawback of that. I'm not sure that they can, in part just inherently because of the binary nature of resting and in part because resting is cheap which is difficult to change (bringing back fatigue from travel time could help some, but that's far from ideal either). It's ultimately a remnant from the olden days when you had a GM to make it work, but it just never really translated well to cRPG.

Hmm, not sure what happened there. You do have Skuldr Kings in the last bit of the Eothas temple there, though only on Hard and PotD probably. It doesn't get its own bestiary entry, the don't always do; it's just beefed up version of the regular Skuldr though. You can get more info from the combat log by hovering your mouse cursor over an entry, this gives a small pop-up window with all sorts of extra info on that entry. Sometimes a larger number of joined events (for example the Consecrated Ground event in your screenshot) are merged into a single line, if you click on this it will expand to a full list of the underlying events (which you can again hover over if you want their full individual details).

No, Wild Orlan's just get added that ability, the ability itself doesn't check race at any stage. You should be able to console it onto any character regardless of race, and it still work (well, for primary attacks anyway.

It does target will, actually. I think it's indeed the fact that the Shadow's Daze effect is secondary to its attack (also in terms of implementation). Poking through the code I don't see an obvious reason why it doesn't work, though clearly it doesn't. I also tried it with Gref's Authority (also a Will secondary attack) which didn't trigger Defiant Resolve either, while for example Miasma of Dull-mindedness does.

Hmm, just one per encounter would rather undermine the flexibility of the classes, I think. Ultimately it would probably be better to move all casting into the same framework of spells powered by some quantified resource, like Chanters, Ciphers and Monks already have. This gives a nice streamlined design overall, and offers lot of options to have different classes accumulate their resource in different ways, as well as allowing for more interaction in general; ie. because it is a numeric value rather than 'X per rest', both the number and the accumulation rate can be made to be affected much more easily by other effects. To some extent this is done already with Focus Gain for Ciphers, but there's a lot more that could be done with that. For example, Mages might have Mana as their resource (which for example just accumulates over time during combat), and have eg. a Necromancer specialisation which can more cheaply cast Necromancy-type spells (but pays more for other spells) which gets extra mana everytime he kills an enemy with such a spell. And I also still like the notion of Mages being able to cast the same spell at different power levels, which resource-based casting would also allow, but that's a separate question. More generally though, I do thing the entire per rest and per encounter system needs to be revised, also in relation to Health. Even if the spellcasting is changed, everything else that works per rest is still faced with the issue that resting is essentially too cheap. You'd still get the situation that there is essentially no cost to spamming big bosses with Figurine summons for example. Something like a longer-term cooldown would work better for those types of abilities.

Maybe you lack imagination then, because there are entirely reasonable arguments for being annoyed about it. Obviously the bug itself it is not game breaking, but it is still quite a bad bug. Sure, if you know about it you can easily avoid it, reducing it to a manageable nuisance. But plenty of people won't know about it, will take Confident Aim for their fighter, and end up with a very overpowered character. So it's not just a matter of pretending an ability doesn't exist. More generally, I'd say that although a patch cannot be expected to fix everything, we can at least expect a reasonable effort to avoid introducing new bugs. This one was reported during the beta but never acknowledged; the patch was pushed out of beta a couple of weeks later seemingly without any further changes (raising the question, why the wait?), introducing an additional fairly bad bug for non-WM players in the process. And as it turns out, the bug itself is relatively easy to track down and consists of a single incorrect character of code, so it's not as if fixing it would be such an arduous affair. But sure, being annoyed at buggy patches and poor communication... cannot possibly be anything other than immaturity

Good to know that it doesn't work when he's already recruited (though it makes sense, given the nature of the bug). I can imagine the time counters will stay a bit wonky, but presumably you can live with that .

Personally I try to keep recovery times a bit lower on Durance, he isn't the most dexterous of characters to begin with and I like being able to cast buffs and debuffs quickly as the need arises. In my current playthrough (hard, just a bit into act 2) I have him in fine robes (with a hood on it looks quite nice on him, actually) and with a war bow. I also keep him far enough away from the fray that he tends not to get targetted much to begin with, and I generally have Pallegina around gunning it up who can step in to mop up the odd straggler breaking through the front line. My main tank barbarian is virtually unkillable so far (though they'll just keep on trying, must be the atrocious Deflection he's sporting) so stuff like Consecrated Ground isn't that necessary anyway. So it will also depend on how you want to play him in that sense, more focus on spells like Consecrated Ground and other aura-like spells / centered on caster spells requires much closer proximity to the frontline, which calls for a sturdier built like Ohmega describes. In that case you could also consider a Pike or Quarterstaff as main weapon. More generally, I agree with the points made above: if it's too easy so far, raise the difficulty. And if Durance keeps getting knocked out it's probably more to do with how you play him than specific equipment choices. You can certainly make a frontline(-ish) melee Priest is you really want to but Durance isn't ideal for that; and regardless, you'd still need to manage him a bit so he doesn't get the brunt of the enemy assault.

Hu? That's what I wanna have for supper! Nah, I'd have some overweging instead .

That's mainly in relation to DR though. The +X% damage modifiers end up as a combined multiplier to the base damage, which is (all else being equal) the same regardless of weapon type. Doesn't matter whether you do a lot of small hits or one big one, it's still a linear function; so you could do five hits of 2 damage or one hit of 10 damage, apply a x1.5 multiplier to each hit and you end up with 15 damage either way. But of course spreading that damage over multiple hits incurs multiple DR deductions, and thus affects fast DW more than normal DW and normal DW more than 1H and 2H. But math is fun regardless

Yeah, for Full Attack abilities dual-wielding in general and with Sabres in particular does have an inherent advantage because it by definition affects two attacks instead of one; and especially with TR / HoF, indeed. For FoD as well, but probably not actually by too much compared to 1H especially, since the latter still tends to have a better crit chance (and in terms of damage output you do have to also count the partial regular 1H attack that overlaps with the second FoD DW it, of course). For status effect abilities like Knock Down and rogue Strikes it is a bit trickier since the second suppresses the first (if it's better) rather than being additive, but since the best one sticks you have a multiplicative probabilities thing. So whether 1H or DW more successfully delivers the status effect varies considerably. Though frankly, for the most effectively delivery of ability-based status effects, nothing can really beat a Blunderbuss; despite the -10 ACC it has you virtually can't graze or miss with it, and don't need too much ACC or HtoC to get massive crit rates (especially since the individual pellets interact, so stuff Blinding Strike in particular is enormously more effective with Blunderbuss). Anyway, like I said, dual-wielding Sabres is certainly going to be a good bet. But it's hardly the only game in town and its alleged superiority seems to be rather overstated (and simply incorrect, depending on various other factors), which I do enjoy poking holes into .

The reason I asked is because it is indeed tied to White March 2. See also Sking's post above (px2 = White March 2), it seems that somehow the auto-leveling for the base game got accidentally contaminated with references to WM2 abilities, and since those don't actually exist in your game you get those errors. This bug arose in the patching to version 3.03, a week or two ago. Hiravias has so far been the main problem in this regard (he might be the only one contaminated actually, though possibly Durance as well, with other issues just a collateral effect), so when he wasn't there in Brighthollow it would indeed not have been a problem to go there. Quest rewards are always put in the chest in the main keep by the way. Anyway, having White March 2 installed does resolve the issue as well, one of the first people who reported the bug tried that successfully (and I never could reproduce the bug with other people's savegames either, loading them into my own game). So if you were planning to get those anyway you could just do that now. But I wouldn't buy them just for that reason (they're well worth it in my view mind you, but you shouldn't have to buy them just as a patch), turning auto-level off should fix it well enough for now until they release a permanent fix. I did read other people who turned auto-level back on after adding a companion with no ill effect, so it might work properly when they are in your party. I'd just make sure to make a separate save occasionally as you approach a new level, just as a precaution. And turn it off at least temporarily if you're making changes to your party.

I agree that the whole per encounter / per rest distinction is probably the biggest issue to address. As is, having to rest is indeed too low a cost for it, and easily paid. This applies primarily to the casters of course, but applies to per rest abilities and items generally. One obvious and I think promising direction to take it in would be to turn it into a cool-down system. Rather than regenerating after rest abilities and items would regenerate after a set amount of time; as in active playing time, not in-game time, so it would incur a genuine cost. A big advantage would be that it is a general system that applies not just to the caster but to everything, and it gives a great deal of flexibility in terms of balancing because you can change the cooldown durations and number of uses before cooldown in a graded manner. It would also make sense to change the per encounter abilities into short term (within encounter) cooldown abilities as well. This would also address the issue of such abilities scaling more nicely with very long encounters. I also agree that it is time to innovate more in class design in this sense, and that PoE2 would be a very good time to do it. I would be much interested in tapping into new ways of converting resources into abilities (like the Chanters, Ciphers and Monks do now), especially the Priest class seems thematically a very viable class to do something with in this regard, but I would also like them to use something like a cooldown system to build on the more classical design of time and limited availability as a resource. With a basic cooldown system in place, it would obviously also become possible to have different ways in which it is affect for different classes / ability types. The cooldown needn't be a constant value, for Wizards we might for example have that it is affected by the number of spells recently cast; eg. unleashing a whole barrage of spells in a single combat leaves the Wizard so exhausted that it will longer to regenerate any of them than had he just cast a spell or two. Items, stats, etc. could also be made to affect cooldown duration in a meaningful way. A further step might be to have a class (the Wizard itself, or maybe a new one) do away with specific more directly use a more explicit mana-like resource that replenishes over time like a cooldown, doing away with the fixed number of available spells per level altogether. More powerful spells would obviously cost more (preferably non-linearly), and it might be interesting to actually be able to cast every spell at different levels of power and associated mana cost , perhaps simply doing away with the whole spell-level altogether. That is, you could cast a tiny fireball with small damage and small radius but very little cost, up to giant conflagration of flame that fills the whole screen but largely drains your mana resource. This would give the Wizard(-type character) a lot of strategic flexibility, and would also remove the issue of getting stuck with low-level spells that get useless later in the game. Would also be nice to be able to cast all (or maybe just some) spells basically for free at a lowest power level, around the level of a regular auto-attack (maybe just make it possible to tie specific spells as auto-attack to an implement; better implements/enchantments would then boost the spell effect cast through it), this would give them something to contribute to combat without draining their mana resource. With regard to multi-classing and such, I do hope they stay away from that (and dual-classing even more so). It's a nightmare to balance properly and it rather takes away from the uniqueness of the individual classes. And given that there is already plenty of room for all sorts of different builds within classes, it doesn't seem that necessary anyway. I would definitely like to see more kits and class specializations (especially specialist mages), but then they should be genuine kits. Not just having different kits give access to some unique talents and a stat boost or something, but restrictions and penalties as well. If my character is a wizard specializing as a pyromancer, he should be very good at setting things on fire in new and interesting ways but this should come at the cost of not being as good in other wizardly areas; that, in a general sense, is what specialization does, after all. This would give them much more flavour, and makes it a genuine choice between choosing a specialist kit or opting for a generalist wizard (or whatever) instead. I'd also like to see in particular some fighter kits or specialization paths relating to weapon styles; they are the pure martial class after all, so it would be nice to be able to specialize them in dual wielding or two-handed weapons (or specific types of weapon) significantly beyond what other classes can do.

Odd. For me it disappeared after I quicksaved and quickloaded in his save. Strange that it would carry over to your own save game. Especially since it wasn't technically a UI glitch as such; in the log file I saw a whole host of out of range exceptions, relating to some array containing the companions. Because the drag selection obviously references that array as well it started to glitch. No idea why Kana was so special there though, tried Pallegina as well with no problem.

As an aside, you've also got to wonder to what extent the commonly recommended choice of Sabre is necessarily ideal when dual-wielding. In my simple setup above I also tested DW daggers vs DW sabres against 0 DR: 870 vs 805 damage; and DW stilettos vs DW sabres against 9 DR: 341 vs 302 damage. Obviously this will be influenced by a host of additional factors as well, but again I think it pays to carefully consider the options. After all, in terms of speed you can't do better than those (A = 0.51, R = 0.54).

I loaded your savegame and added Kana, there's definitely something off about it. Got the issue you described, as well as a weird glitch with the character drag-selection. There's a whole bunch of index out of range errors in the log file as well. Maybe the savegame got slightly corrupted at some point, somehow. Anyway, I would suggest that you retrain Kana. This seems to fix the issue, he just resets with the standard level 1 stuff he starts with normally, and you can level him back up from there. I did get a slight quirk after that when quicksaving and quickloading that he moved to the second NPC slot and his portrait didn't show in the save game entry, but saving again after that resolved that as well so I think you should be fine from there.

Not sure where the +50% comes from, that's different from what the different attack speed threads seem to say. But then again, the exact mechanics remain a bit unclear to me even with those, so I did a bit of testing: identical level 2 fighters (all stats at 10), except for their weapon style talent. Attacking in fast mode for 30 seconds, they perform the following number of attacks / duration per attack (using long swords): - DW, naked (0.3R): 32 / 0.94s - DW, plate armour (0.8R): 22 / 1.36s - 1H, naked (1R): 19 / 1.58s - 1H, plate armour (1.5R): 15 / 2s With R the base recovery duration and the number the proposed multiplier if dual-wielding by itself gives a flat -50% to R. This indeed fits very well, pretty much confirming that model, and in this case we end up with a fixed attack time A = 0.67s and R = 0.89s. However, whether that translates to more damage is another question, and my point remains that this is not so straightforward. I also had my fighters attack a single target for 1 minute (fast mode) to see their damage output. Naked with long swords against a 0 DR / 25 DEF target DW is a clear winner, with 699 damage against 506. But under more realistic conditions this changes dramatically. Wearing scale armour and wielding Resolution sabres against 9 DR, this becomes 282 and 284 damage; and against 15 DR, 261 and 270 damage. In fact against the last one I also tried an identical fighter except for two-handed talent and wielding a fine estoc, and he did 282 damage. And sure, maybe the best, most optimized DPS build is indeed a dual-wielder; I'm certainly not denying the effectiveness of dual-wielding. But I do want to underscore that its supposed superiority over other weapon styles is not nearly as evident as it is frequently made out to be, and if it is indeed superior the difference is likely to be relatively modest.

Can you also not add the companions stored at the stronghold? If that does work normally, I would just avoid the second floor and not worry about it. If you have no items stored there, there is little reason to go up there anyway. Save games shouldn't become corrupted I'd think, but just to be sure you can make some copies you can fall back on should something go wrong later (either just make an additional save game you don't overwrite, or manually copy the save game files in the PoE save game folder to another folder as backup).

It might well be that when using HoF it doesn't happen, because those additional attacks happen as part of HoF. In any case, with just regular attacking it seems to be very consistent. I just started a new game, made a barbarian, used console to add Larder Door and set Resolve to 200, and attacked a random caravanner. In the ensuing melee it triggered without fail. What I also noticed is that the second Bash attack is invariably aimed at the first enemy targetted by Carnage (ie. the first enemy listed for the Carnage damage of the initial Carnage, even if the Carnage attack on that enemy missed). There also isn't a new 'activates Bash' in the log (you do get one both before the regular initial attack and again before the initial Carnage). Moreover, it also works with activated abilities like Knockdown, this also results in a second Bash with full Knockdown (oddly, now you do get the two extra 'activates Bash' in the log; also the damage part of the second Knockdown says (Bash) rather than (Knock Down) in front of it). I've dug a bit through the code, but why exactly this is happening remains unclear (backtracing this sort of thing through disassembled code is rather tricky). Why Carnage triggers a second bash (if it technically does so; the lack of 'activates Bash' suggests that it actually bypasses the originating Bash GenericAbility somehow), why only one instance is triggered (possibly because further instances are blocked because it does not support multiple simultaneous activations), and why its subsequent Carnage instance doesn't trigger any further ones (because it takes a different route, somehow)...? I'm just not sure.

I agree that there should be a better balance there. Though I think that (in PoE2) they should actually just change the Sabre instead, make it a bit weaker. Just Slashing damage isn't enough of a downside to justify its damage range, especially compared to regular 1H and 2H damage ranges. But I would expect they'll revisit that issue anyway, for example I can't imagine they'll leave the whole 'average' 1H vs 'slow' 2H (non-)thing the way it is now.

Except that dual-wielding doesn't double your attack speed. Again, take the example of Sabre with 30 frames attack time and 36 (DW) / 54 (1H) frames base recovery time. Assume -20% recovery time from Two weapon style and -80% from other sources, for 0 recovery when dual wielding. This makes the attack duration 30 (DW) and 40.8 (1H) frames. So the actual comparison you would need to make is 1 attack at +12 ACC and +15% HtoC conversion versus 1.36 attacks; it's not remotely a 1 : 2 ratio. I also don't see why the utility of greater accuracy or HtoC conversion would be limited to the early game; the general point throughout the game is ultimately to hit things, no? It's ultimately a trade-off between attacking more often vs doing more damage per attack. DW boosts the attack rate, whereas both 1H and 2H in different ways boost the damage dealt. Which one is better in terms of DPS or some other criterium isn't nearly as obvious as it is sometimes claimed to be. Though dual-wielding seems to be considered obviously superior by many, the mathematics just doesn't back that up.