Loren Tyr

Ah yes, if only I had read the rest of the thread... I'd have known about your constant tendency to pretend you know what others did or considered or were motivated by. I'd have known about your hilariously hypocritical reprimand of Abel to stop trying to (badly) read your mind (I presume you wish to reserve that right for yourself)? I'd have known that you took what is at it's core certainly a reasonable position and managed to make pretty much everyone disagree with you. Oh wait, I did. Though you're certainly correct on one thing: there is exceedling little point in discussing things with you.

I'd be pretty annoyed if you really could easily go around with a glass cannon whaling on enemies that remain stupidly transfixed on trying to put a dent in the tank in front of them. Sacrificing defense for DPS should definitely require you to come up with other strategies for having your character survive. Go for the hit-and-run strike (running around with a giant two-handed sword backstabbing and poisoning dudes is frankly hilarious), actively maneauver to avoid too much engagement, judiciously pick your targets (go for the weaker ones to thin the herd, eviscerate enemies that have been disabled or strongly debuffed first), wield a pike or staff and poke enemies in the eye from outside their attack and engagement range, pray to the Obsidian gods for them to put an ACTUAL pike in the game rather than the puny pigsticker they made (*grumblegrumble*). Sorry, got sidetracked there. But yeah, the glassier the cannon, the more care you'll need to wield it. I'd say that's how it's supposed to be, and much of the fun in using them as well. And it's definitely viable.

Seriously, what bizarre kind of build are you running that post-patch it became utterly useless? What happened, it's arms and legs fell off and now is just being carted around in a wheelbarrow by Eder from scene to scene? Also, when you go ahead and recruit a custom companion, might I suggest perhaps clicking the retrain button first? Because if you seriously feel that some ability or build setup has been gimped to uselessness, maybe just change them? Or were you so caught up in righteous whinging that you forgot about that incredibly obvious possibility?

Ah, yes. Those players playing on fairly forgiving difficulty levels, whose delicately crafted builds have become utterly unplayable by assorted class and item changes. Somehow. What I always wonder about, in many threads I read on this forum: so many people here are apparently quite in the loop on the inner motivations and considerations of the Obsidian dev team. Curious, that.

No one except yourself has argued that everyone is a mage or that wizards aren't special. So you've effectively won an argument against yourself, with arguments you made but no one else has. It only took him eleven pages though, so you know... uhm... Sorry, no. That's just depressing . Maybe reading some world news will cheer me up though

I find many of them quite useful actually. But yes, it is intentional and supposed to happen this way. They have to be activated, hence being classified as active; it also says so in the in-game cyclopedia. Though I imagine for example the melee-deflection bonus of quarterstaff does stack with other active general deflection bonuses, so in practice it depends a bit.

Rather than slowing down multiclass level advancement, it might be better to up the resources single class characters get. Making it even slower I think hurts the multiclasses too much, and you start to run out of low-level abilities to pick as well. And conversely, it's always seemed strange to me that multi-classes get more resources, at a given level than single class (more so with generic resources than spells, but even so). Makes more sense to (more or less) fix the amount of resource per level, and just split that across two pools for multi and put it all in the same for single (again obviously a bit different for spells, but a reasonable formula should be straightforward; maybe three per level instead of two, perhaps getting the third a bit later). Boosting the late game powers more would be nice as well mind you. But I think there needs to be more difference from the start to really balance it out.

Although I certainly agree that PoE lore and metaphysics could be much more fleshed out, I'd also say that the comparison to D&D is ultimately unfair. After all, D&D has existed and been actively developed for... how long now? Decades, anyway, and with however many contributors. And proportionately the lore aspect is a much larger part, being a pen&paper game; not much time spent on coding and graphics, anyway. Starting from scratch on the lore when building a computer game, you're never going to beat that in terms of depth.

This is a fairly bizarre example to be honest, because it pretty much proves my point: in a general sense, practicing medicine is quite widespread. As you get to the less common and more specialized stuff, you really start to move to the exclusive domain of doctors. But basic first aid, cures to common ailments, suchlike. Quite a lot of people know that, and probably more so in the past when people had to rely more on themselves (and still now, in areas where there isn't much modern medicine available (at short notice or at all)). That certainly doesn't require years of training, part of it is really just stuff many people will just pick up as they grow up. And there is also a whole range of people between doctors with years of medical training and the average person: nurses and EMTs obviously have a fair degree of medical training and knowledge, as do many other non-doctors who are working in or adjacent to the medical field. Any larger company will have a bunch of people with extra training, people spending a lot of time for job or leisure away from direct medical care will as well. And talking about fighters: I would imagine modern soldiers are given additional training in first and such as well, seems like a rather pertinent skill on a battlefield. So yeah, medical skill and knowledge seems like fairly common thing to me; distributed across a continuous scale. So how is this in support of your argument exactly?

Firstly, even though PoE is a high magic setting, it's hardly like everyone's throwing fireballs around. Many of the abilities on non-caster classes can easily be explained as mundane or mundane-adjacent (eg. maybe tapping into something slightly magical, but nothing on the level of proper spellwork), in conjunction with the constraints of having to present it in a practical way. For example the Rogue's Escape ability can simply be seen as a mundane skill, an ability to maneauver quickly through a melee situation without being hit; with the visual effects there simply to make clear to players what is going on, and the 'teleport' aspect merely a convenient game mechanic (clearly what is shown on screen is not meant to be literal anyway). But secondly, why would a reality where everyone has magical abilities to varying degrees be less believable than one where only some people have magical ability, exactly? Certainly one can think of scenarios where only a few people have it (eg. it's bestowed by divine favour from some deity), but there is no particular reason to see that as the norm. And even if it were the norm in fantasy settings, that still would not make the alternative not believable. Looking at our own reality, human abilities and dispositions and such are almost invariably distributed along some continuous scale (and usually well-modeled by a normal distribution as well), in particular if they are inherited (and many of the ones that are not are of the sort you really don't want). So I would argue that if anything is the more believable default scenario, it would be the one where everyone has some level of magical aptitude.

Except that his argument seems to be just that (heavily paraphrasing): "I don't like it / it's not believable, because everyone has (seemingly) magical abilities to varying degrees". His objection seems to be just the mere fact of ubiquitous magic, and presumably would still be the same had Obsidian written a 500-page tome describing the exact rules of its reality, and the way souls and magic figure into that. The whole "[person] has this ability because souls" certainly isn't deeply compelling, and I'd love to have seen these sorts of things fleshed out more. But that is an entirely different discussion.

You were criticising the fact that many non-caster classes have (seemingly) magical abilities. Reasonably it follows that you would want those classes to not have such abilities, which in effect is arguing that there should be less magic. So what was taken out of context, exactly? I would also note that the fact that you disagree with the end result is hardly evidence that the creators put zero though into it. Your comparison between magic and science also falls flat. Science is the systematic study of our reality, which is distinct of that reality itself (yes I know, philosophical discussions here abound, but I'll stick the essence of it). The rules and regularities by which that reality operates did so long before humans and science came along, and will continue to do so long after humanity has vanished. In an alternate reality that differs from our own, that contains forces we would call 'magic', that magic is part of the reality. It would also be distinct of the practice of, or study of, that magic. Wizardry therefore might be considered akin to science, with magic its object of study and/or the core of its practice. Or a proto-science or craft anyway, in most settings it's not developed and systematic enough to equate to modern science. Regardless of how you define it exactly, the point is the same: systematically studying, and practicing manipulation of, forces of nature and such can be a very fruitful enterprise, but it is hardly a prerequisite for using those forces. Humans have been able to use, say, the force of gravity for as long as we have existed, long before any scientist came along to theorize about it. If there were something like magic, and there were some capacity for biological organisms to tap into that, then the use of magic will inherently have predated any more formalized study of it. Even in a world where the use of magic is predominantly the domain of wizards, there must have been a period before there was any formalized wizardry; people must have somehow discovered this ability, they will have used it to their advantage. There is no particular reason to suppose that once something like wizardry started to arise, all people with any ability to manipulate magic will have ended up being wizards. Realistically this ability will vary in a fairly continuous fashion across individuals, like intellect, physical strength, etc. do in our reality. Even if all the people with high magical aptitude ended up as wizards (which is a big stretch sociologically anyway, and not all cultures would have such institutions anyway nor would those be the same across cultures), there would still be a majority of people in any population that has some lesser level of magical aptitude and would certainly make use of that in their daily lives. Just as clearly not all intelligent people become scientists (and not nearly all scientists are intelligent, moreover), and people who are not scientists will use their intelligence for whatever else they choose to do. So no, the idea that the use of magic would be inherently restricted to very specific subsets of people, especially specific socially / culturally defined subsets, is deeply implausible. It can certainly be justified in specific settings (though even then it wouldn't be *that* binary, in most scenarios), but that takes quite a bit of extra work; if we think of what a reality with magic in it would look like, you'd have to come up with a lot more restrictions on it for that to be the case. So while that may the kind of fantasy setting you prefer, the notion that this is how magic should or is supposed to be in fantasy settings is ridiculous. Nor does the fact that it is a common trope in fiction, in various forms. It's also rather rich to accuse creators of lacking imagination and putting in zero thought when they elect to not follow common traditions from fantasy settings. Surely, the least effortful and imaginitive would be sticking to those traditions, rather than diverging from them.

Yeah, much agreed. In many settings a lot of magic is probably something like manipulating some kind of energy, tapping into some kind of (super)natural force, something to that effect. There would be no particular reason at all why that would need to involve anything linguistic or symbolic (both in the form of gestures as well as stuff like runic magic, really). I mean, what... the forces of nature are going to do your bidding but only if you ask them nicely / draw them a pretty picture? It makes more sense when it is meant to represent drawing on the power of some deity or demon or spirit or whatever, but even then you have to wonder: would such entities really be that fussy about the details? It's this kind of thing that tends to bother me most frequently about fantasy (and sci-fi; any "not proper reality", really) settings, that the internal logic and coherence of these fairly major things is just weak or lacking altogether. Which is also begging for a deus ex machina at some point, because there isn't anything stopping the authors from just making something up to get them out of a corner they painted themselves into, and calling it "magic" (or "reversing the shield polarity"). A lot of it is indeed just because they are common tropes, which always feels a bit lazy and uninteresting. Though actually, a setting where magic really was treated scientifically could of course be very interesting (even then, it's hardly just scientists that use science anyway) Having said that I can certainly see how in a setting with magic, systems like this could arise even if it isn't actually necessary for the magic to happen. As a rule inhabitants of such a reality won't exactly know how magic works after all, and how to manipulate whatever is driving it. Particular rituals or incantations or gestures may just be what happened to work for them, these just happen to be practical ways to perform whatever physical or mental action that is necessary to make the magic happen. But in that case it's more a psychological thing, a trick of sorts, which you'd expect to then vary considerably across cultures and such; and similarly, just mimicking the phrases and gestures by itself would then not necessarily have any effect (just as even the most convincing-sounding parrot isn't actually speaking). I think Wheel of Time did something like this. I recall that the contemporary Aes Sedai all learned their channeling in a way that involved gesturing, even though it turned out that it wasn't actually necessary; but having learned it that way, that's the only way they could do it (and I think also there was mention that they could sometimes recognise who taught a particular weave to an Aes Sedai, by the details of their gestures).

Depends on how you define 'justify', I would argue. Because from the perspective of optimized PotD builds, maybe not. But something doesn't have to be the best possible thing for it to be justified, there just have to be good reasons for it. If it synergizes well with other abilities you've chosen, if it fits well with the play style or build you're after, if you just think it's fun... those seem like excellent justifications to me (also RP reasons of course, but focusing on the mechanics for now). For me, I'm perfectly happy with my Death Godlike poisoner character running around putting DoTs on everything in sight; the race fits the character very well, and the +20% bump at the end is certainly useful.

To be honest, in almost any high-magic fantasy setting, it would actually be way more unbelievable if there *were* a strict separation between magic and non-magic classes. Clearly in such a setting the rules of reality are quite different from our own, and people can innately tap into sources of power and do things that are impossible in our reality. Given this, there is no particular reason to assume that this capability is restricted to a select subset of people, unless the setting provides a specific justification for that being the case. And in fact in most cases those justifications aren't particulary convincing anyway if they are there; if we look at our own reality, abilities and aptitudes and dispositions, and natural properties of objects and environments as well, these almost invariably follow some continuous statistical distribution. Cognitive faculties, physical strength, psychiatric disorder, 2D:4D ratio, what have you... it is not discrete categories, it's invariably all on a spectrum. Why would it be any different for fantasy abilities? Of course some people would have a lot of natural talent for a particular set of abilities, like arcane magic; and these people would be much or likely to end up as, and be succesful as, a wizard (though again, realistically a host of environmental, social and cultural factors are going to affect such 'career' trajectories). But there will be many others who will have only some natural aptitude of this kind, or who perhaps had more but never had the interest or resources to become a wizard (and quite possibly, whether you have an aptitude for it may not be inherently obvious to people themselves anyway). And they are bound to tap into that, consciously or unconsciously, in whatever other path in life they end up following, whether that's a soldier, a politician, a farmer, a thief, whatever. Just as people in our reality will tend to use their specific intelllectual abilities, creative talents, physical prowess, et cetera, in whatever they do; even if those aren't the primary prerequisites for whatever it is they do. And I would add to this also that by necessity, what is shown in the game is an abstraction. This applies to most games but especially to stat-based games like this. For example, people have shields, but do we ever see them use those? Auto-attacking characters essentially do nothing for a bit, then every so often swing their weapon at their enemy; their enemy does the same, there is no interaction there. If we interpret this literally, it is completely ridiculous; imagine you saw the same thing in a movie (not that movie fights are anywhere near realistic, but much better than that). Clearly, we are meant to see this as a more abstract depiction of what's really going on. So is it then so much of a stretch that the Escape ability is meant to represent the nimble rogue darting past people, dodging their attacks? Perhaps powered by some form of magic, but even if it were completely mundane this depiction would be entirely reasonable (especially keeping in mind considerations of graphical design, it should be reasonably clear and recognisable what's happening in a potentially quite crowded fight scene).

I noticed that consuming a Potion of Spirit Shield breaks stealth (both regular and from invisibility effects) for some reason. There is no particular reason or indication that it should (noise level is set to quiet, and I haven't encountered this with other potions/drugs/poisons so far), so I presume it is a bug. Perhaps it invokes the Spirit Shield spell (which I assume would, and is supposed to, break stealth)?

You can use Escape for this though. It doesn't break stealth (if you pick your landing spot right, anyway), and personally I never tire of my assassin tumbling across the battlefield and burying his axe in someone's skull in one flowing motion . I'm certainly not happy about the Backstab nerf mind you, makes my axe bleed less excessively as well, and in terms of optimization it's probably not a priority pick. But especially on an assassin character it's definitely useful (being an assassin you'll want to be frequently invisible anyway, and ranged assassins are lame ), even if it's just at the start of combat.

This doesn't track. You can't use an example based on the explicit premise that the spell is poorly chosen to conclude that the system is flawed.

Well, centrifugal force obviously. Axes are top-heavy, so proper dual-wielding technique for them is to spin around like a top, a veritable whirlwind of death.

I definitely agree there, it should be more balanced. Doesn't have to be perfectly realistic or anything, but some passing resemblance to reality would be nice. And I think, would also make the combat aspect more interesting. For example, factoring in the defensive capabilities of weapons more (eg. swords would definitely outclass axes and maces there, and two-handed weapons are generally good for that as well), the enormous value of reach, etc. Give weapons some more dimensions, which would also make them stronger or weaker depending on what weapons you're facing etc. And same with shields for that matter, those could also be differnentiated much more than just deflection bonuses and accuracy penalties (the latter don't really make sense anyway). And again for armour, would be nice if there was greater depth there (cause there was a reason dudes in plate armour rarely used shields, would be nice if that same logic could work in a game as well). And with dual-wielding, I would say that should be restricted to a light off-hand weapon like daggers and hatchets and the like. Dual wielding swords (let alone axes) is just idiotic. And definitely, it should give some additional defense and offense (maybe have a certain chance of scoring a 'free' off-hand attack when defending with the main weapon, a bit like the Riposte ability), but certainly not increasing attack speed.

That, and also just assorted street combat of course. Cause mostly, having a second weapon tends to be better than having nothing (though using a free hand for grappling or grabbing an opponent's sword blade is definitely useful as well). Bucklers are still generally superior though (and indeed were used in duels as well) as those are better blocking and parrying, especially against heavier blades. They're just not usually to hand in daily life whereas knives and daggers would be, but they would generally be preferably if available.

Leather armour was a thing actually. It gets quite tough if you cure it properly; in Africa in particular it was also use for shields. Processed this way it's nothing like the leather we're used to though. Studded leather on the other hand... that's very much a movie/fantasy trope (as is the idea of using torches in dungeons), presumably first devised by someone with a heavy metal fetish. And indeed, there are some historical instances of dual wielding but they are quite rare (and essentially never seen in battle, shields are just sooooo much better). Mostly something like sword and dagger, or dual dagger, the main purpose of the off-hand weapon would be defense. Windmilling around in a flurry of cuts would get you killed quite quickly, as would trying to wield eg. two axes (hatchets would work though). I mean, a second weapon is better than nothing in most cases, but it really never was a recommend tactic. Hence why off-hand weapons were often knives or daggers; like swords, they're sidearms, so if you're just out and about that's likely what you'd have at hand. Hardly going to drag around a shield all day after all (though a buckler would work). @Veolfen: very true. The terminology is quite arbitrary anyway, there's such a range of polearms (and swords, etc.) with such gradual differences, that it's often really hard to clearly distinguish the categories. And many of the names we use now, especially for swords, are a much later invention anyway (admittedly, the Romans did call their gladius a gladious, though :D).

Can't make the hammer too heavy though (real warhammer heads, either one- or two-handed, aren't that large; around the size of a typical modern claw hammer I think). Not much point to them if they're too slow to actually hit anyone with, after all. Which of course does not make the whole "more weapons = hitting more often" any less ludicrous (mostly cause you really can't, to any effect).

Agreed. For plate armour against plate armour I'd probably prefer a pollaxe over a halberd (bit shorter and more wieldy, and hammer head is a bit more useful than an axe head), but definitely: plate + polearm is pretty much top dog in most match ups, until you start talking firearms or heavy crossbows (and even then, one on one, I'd probably back armour guy). I would argue that one-handed swords can definitely be faster, eg. a smallsword (completely different era obviously, but still). Then again, regardless of speed, in a duel the guy with the one-handed sword is quickly going to be comtemplating the value of reach. And very much with the leather armour; it's quite heavy as well.

Well, it looks cool. You see it in movies and tv shows all the time as well, makes characters look especially badass (same with ridiculously oversized and overweight two-handed weapons actually). In reality a dude with shield and spear would pretty much wipe the floor with them most of the time, but yeah... combat in fiction unfortunately has a fairly tenuous resemblance to reality. About great swords though, even though they're heavy-ish (around 3 kg), the weight is mostly at the hilt end so against heavy armour swinging it at people isn't really going to do much damage. Using it as essentially a spear or half-swording and going for a gap, that'd be the way to go. Or using it a big lever, getting them on the ground and stabbing them in the neck with a rondel dagger. I mean, if you're really intent on bludgeoning then reversing the sword and hitting them with the pommel or cross guard will do in a pinch, but it's not ideal. In any case the great swords in the game actually look more like longswords, which really weren't that heavy. The great swords (in modern terminology, ie. the Zweihänder and such) were typically longer than shown in the game, and had larger guards and often side rings and a set of lugs after the ricasso as well. They were also too large to put in a scabberd (and pretty much no sword was put in a scabberd on the back either, certainly not longswords). Oh well, my dream of an RPG with realistic weapon handling lives on...