Loren Tyr

There's something odd about those Achievements stats anyway, actually. Because although the "Won the game" achievement is indeed at 9.5%, the Super Murdered is at 16.8%, and according to the description you get this when you "complete the game killing 1200 or more creatures and NPCs". Or is the description just wrong, and you just get it whenever you hit the 1200 mark? I never paid much attention to the achievements, so I don't recall whether I got that one myself.

That's an activated ability itself though, can't have Reach and Envenomed Strike at the same time.

Hmm, Envenomed Carnage doesn't seem to work unfortunately.

For a while now at least, I've used it before. Not sure from which version onwards though, but it's just the same principle as applies to the Soulbound Scepter dominate effect triggering on blast. It should also work with Carnage by the way, I'd expect, though I don't recall having tried it. Envenomed Strike also works rather nicely with blunderbuss by the way, if you want to increase your chances of hits / crits on high Fortitude targets.

They don't stay at your level. They gain 75% of base experience, compared to the 100% - 150% that the active party members gain. As such they will inherently start to lag behind the active party members, and the quests can thus be used to somewhat compensate for that. The reason they were at maximum level when you picked them up again must have been that you gained enough experience that they reached that point despite them getting less of it. They don't stop gaining experience once your main party members hit the experience cap.

I agree, it certainly could be clearer. Some kind of visualisation of queued actions (consumable or otherwise) would have been quite useful. We can petition them to put it in PoE2, though .

Agreed, you can certainly make it work. They'll never be the tankiest of tanks of course, but you can make them plenty of sturdy enough to survive. Also keep in mind that a rogue doesn't necessarily need to invest in Might to deal good damage, so you can consider investing some more attribute points (and item attribute bonuses/slots) in for example Constitution.

It's not necessarily a glitch as such, but yeah... clicking a second consumable while still consuming the first one won't do anything, since the character is still busy. As such the second consumption doesn't happen at all. What you can do is queue them (ie. shift-click), that way your character will start eating the second (third, etc.) consumable once no longer busy. And indeed, in combat using items is interruptable like anything else, which is where investing in some Concentration will rather pay off. You should see the interrupts listed in the combat log though. And the character should still try to finish the action afterwards, though I do suspect that in some cases the AI takes over and switches to auto-attack / resumes the action the character was performing before being commanded to consume the potion or whatever.

To summarize the process, experience is gained as follows. Events (quest, bestiary unlock, etc.) provide a certain amount EXP of experience. Each member of the active party receives this amount EXP of experience, with 10% bonus for each member less than 6 in the active party. So: - 6 member party: each gains EXP experience - 5 member party: each gains 1.1 x EXP experience - 4 member party: each gains 1.2 x EXP experience - 3 member party: each gains 1.3 x EXP experience - 2 member party: each gains 1.4 x EXP experience - 1 member party: each gains 1.5 x EXP experience Non-active companions/hirelings always gain 0.75 x EXP (regardless of the active party size). Non-active companions/hirelings that are doing an adventure that gives an XP reward, get an *additional* 75% + (XP reward)%. So suppose the adventure gives a 15% XP reward, the companion/hireling will receive (0.75 + 0.75 + 0.15) x EXP = 1.65 x EXP as long as the adventure is ongoing (note that the amount listed when the adventure ends is only the 75% + (XP reward)% ). Note that the amount of XP listed in the log "Party gained [...] experience" is the sum of the experience the individual active party members gained, so this will vary depending on the active party size (from 6 x EXP in a six member party to 1.5 x EXP when soloing).

I tested it, rechecked yesterday just to be sure it hadn't changed . They don't fully suppress each other though, only the overlapping parts. And because of course for enemies we don't see the partial effects like on our own characters, it isn't directly visible. But from the combat log, it is clear Dazed + Frightened only gives them -10 ACC (well, -12 actually, with the -2 Perception penalty).

Keep in mind though that the Zealous Focus isn't quite like a Weapon Focus talent though. It's just a modal effect, so it won't stack with a lot of things including Flames of Devotion (on the other hand, FoD gives a 20+Level ACC bonus, so it does scale a bit with level).

Dazed and Frightened don't stack (insofar as they overlap), none of the standard status effects though. I can imagine Fatigue is marked as a passive though, so that might well do so.

Which would be considerably more relevant if I was actually making that argument. Rather, I was merely pointing out that if someone finds a particular spell or ability makes a class too powerful, (s)he can simply opt not to use that spell/ability rather than forego using the class altogether. This was the sentiment expressed before. More generally, balancing issues aside, of course players have reason to 'handicap' themselves: because it can be fun for them to do so. Whether this is for roleplaying reasons (my mage is an obsessive pyromaniac and predominantly uses fire-based spells), mechanical/creative reasons (trying an unusual build), challenge reasons (naked PotD solo), or something else... if you derive enjoyment from it, that seems plenty reason to me.

Sure, it's more prominent. That still doesn't explain what's so difficult about not using them if you have decided not to in a given playthrough.

Unless you choose not to. It's not that difficult a concept, really. There's also a console with all sorts of cheat codes, are you using that as well then?

Seconded, Stiletto doesn't trigger for me either. Presumably it's the same issue as with the Dominate on the Soulbound scepter, noted elsewhere in the Tech forum.

That's in itself not a reason to stop playing Druids altogether though. You can also simply not use Relentless Storm when playing a Druid.

Mostly they do, effects that only affect other characters usually say 'Allied AoE' instead (eg. Kind Wayfarer abilities). It's not entirely consistent though; the Figher ability Guardian Stance does say Friendly AoE but the deflection bonus only affects other characters. Not sure whether there are any others though; and Guardian Stance is a bit trickier anyway, since it does affect the character itself with the Accuracy penalty. That might be why it still says Friendly AoE instead (though the "Active Effects" still also say the Figher him/herself gets +10 Deflection, which isn't the case).

Agreed, I just tried it with an old save (against some Justiciars, those shouldn't be immune), no joy. I actually do get "Aloth activates Dominate" messages in the log, but no corresponding attack vs Will rolls or actual Domination. And that's even with Perception set to 100, so it's not like it's just missing.

I would expect so, since presumably it sets the same IsInvisibile state as Shadowing Beyond. That didn't work properly in 3.02 either though (only one backstab, or none at all with Strike abilities), so it could well be that reports of it not working were caused by the same issue. Since Shadowing Beyond is now mostly fixed I would think the Cape should work with it as well. Would need to be tested in 3.03 to be sure though, don't have WM installed at the moment so I can't test that out myself right now.

It mostly works (you get backstab on first two attack, if auto-attacking; works with Strike abilities; works with Shadowing Beyond and such). There are two remaining issues I found: when attacking from Shadowing Beyond (and presumably all other forms of invisibility, other than regular Stealth), it still doesn't work with Strike abilities (you don't get any backstab). When attacking from Stealth while dual-wielding with a Strike ability, you only get backstab on the second attack (but Strike on both); this seems to have something to do with the fact that in this case the off-hand weapon attack is performed first, that's at least my guess. Anyway, I have reported these and they have been added to the bug database, so hopefully they'll still get fixed in the full 3.03 patch.

How would it really differ from Ranger, though? A mage familiar would probably get into similar territory, but more magicky. To be more distinctive it would probably get more into Summoner-type territory. Which could be great fun actually, but might be tricky to keep balanced (maybe tie the Endurance of the summoner to that of his creations to some extent?). Might be interesting to have the animancer/necromancer actually *be* a construct-ish/undead character (akin to Helig).

I particularly like the Firebrand + Flames of Devotion (+ Intense Flames) + Scion as well, especially since the Scion is effectively applied twice. If you have Firebrand + FoD + Intense Flames, adding Scion of Flames actually gives you 53% more fire damage (against the same 1.5 x Fire DR). Hmm, fire....

Well, start off a character with 20 INT, +2 item bonus, +3 Stronghold Forum resting bonus, +2 Salty Mast prostitute bonus, +2 from tasty, tasty Casserole, that gets you to 29 already. And that's available more or less from the beginning of Act 2. There's various other options of course. Keeping up the resting/whoring bonuses all the time can be a hassle (especially if you don't want to keep schlepping back and forth to the Salty Mast), but getting a consistent >25 INT pre-combat is very straightforward. Some stats are easier than others of course, for example you can get 29 RES as soon as you grab Durance (or have another lvl 3 priest), though that does require some spellcasting.

I merely pointed out that, contrary to your claim of expressing what players want, that certainly many of the players here likely disagree with it. And again, you are entirely free to make suggestions, as I am to argue against them. And no, you proved no such thing. The key assumption you make is that the only way to solve this optimization problem is an exhaustive search. It is not, even if you want to guarantee finding the global maximum; and frankly, in most cases (including this one) a good enough local maximum will do just fine. Both simple common sense and decades of mathematicians and computer scientists studying optimization bear this out. But even had you proved that finding the global maximum (or acceptable local maximum) is not feasible in practice... who cares? Despite that alleged infeasibility, plenty of people seem to be deriving a great deal of fun from the game. Apparently what they manage to do with it is quite good enough for them. In any case, I doubt I'll ever get an answer but let me ask one last time: why is it that your enjoyment is so strongly affected by how much room for improvement there is for your party configuration, rather than the quality it already has? Clearly you don't enjoy the improvement process itself, if you consider it tedious. You seem to be saying that you aren't satisfied because it has further potential, but somehow *would* be satisfied if the developers removed that potential; even if the game would otherwise be the same. So you want your (and those of everone else) options to be restricted, rather than simply choosing not to use all your options to their fullest extent?