Zoso der Goldene

@Raven Darkholme Just watched the first couple of episodes of the Bloodmage/Priest of Skaen attempt, nice! But I wonder whether there is a reason not to take Hylea's Boon right away, add the black bird as a pet and do the Helping Hands quest by sneaking through the cave? I costs 2-3 hours tops, you get some more "Deceptive" and "Cruel" options (on deck with the ghost, the other in the cave), and it nets 1484 xp right away. AFAIK food effects last until the next rest, so there's no downside apart from 2-3 hours, but hey, 1484 xp might be worth that. And if it fails for whatever reason - I don't see why it would - it would be so early in that it hardly mattered. Am I missing something (again :)? (To be honest, I TCSed the original game without the DLCs, and now came back for the Ultimate - so I missed the fact that, like PoE1, you can't do DLC content after the main game, silly me:)

So implicitly, it does have a deadline, thanks for the clarification!

Then I don't really understand some of the discussion re: not being able to craft enough Scrolls for most of the bosses - did I miss something?

Does anyone here know whether the "The Ultimate" quest itself is on the Critical Path, i.e. has a due date attached?

That's been the case in PoE all along, both for auto-attacks and full attacks. It's more prominent now, maybe (haven't done the math for Deadfire yet), and there were no weapon modals.

Especially random encounters/auto-generated quests like in Skyrim that break immersion or even the game by accidentally coinciding with other random encounters/quests and story quests. The should stay extra dead. *Sharpens stake*

I don't think it's imbalanced, and you can't really compare on level 20 / PL IX really. They build in a couple of deterrents to multi-classing, and the most powerful is not that you don't get access PL VIII & IX. It's that you get access to PL VII 6 levels later. I think single classes seem under-powered at times because they only use one resource pool, instead of two, so they feel more like one-trick ponies. Some of the classes (like wizard) already work great for both single and multi class play, and the solution for classes that don't is more about tweaking some of the mid-to-higher power levels to make them really attractive. Look what they're doing to Cipher in 1.2. Before that, it was only viable as a multi-class with a martial class for focus generation. Now they speed up things, enhance duration and add some unique things to the list (Brilliant inspiration anyone? That makes deciding between single and multi really hard (which it wasn't for Cipher), and that's how it should be. BTW 2/3rd of playthroughs being attempted with single class characters also seem to indicate that single class is not necessarily underpowered. It's not 100% conclusive, though.

It's about balance in order for the content to be interesting to everyone. That's hard enough to do with the wide range of levels a character might have in any given encounter, especially late- and mid-game.

Completely pointless? Not really, Sacred Immolation just requires high Reflex to work without killing yourself (short of having Sacred Sacrifice or Providence). Weapon and Shield Style, Snake's Reflexes, High Dexterity, High Perception, Equipment, ... all help in that regard - (if that's tanky is another question, but Sacred Immolation is not really "tanky", per se)

The problem that then arises is that you also wouldn't be able to do anything else in most battles. Ultimately that's an issue with the way they've replaced uses/encounter with resources/encounter - every ability has to be balanced as something repeatable that potentially replaces all preceding abilities, rather than as something that will happen X number of times per encounter. /shrug Why that is an issue? U can choose to use FoD 10 times or use SI x1, Lay on hand x2 FoD x4, it’s more flexible than PoE 1. Yes u can barely do anything if u use your high cost abilities a lot times, but it’s all up to you and in PoE 1 you cannot even do this, can u has SI twice in 1? No. It's so flexible that it can be homogeneous. Let's take the paladin as an example: when I built an FoD-focused paladin in PoE1, they'd have a couple of really impressive alpha strikes to use at advantageous times, and then they'd be doing other stuff (healing, tossing down scrolls/spellbinds, tanking, etc) - throughout the fight, I could realistically expect to do a variety of different things. By contrast, a PoE2 paladin optimized for FoD will just use FoD over and over again, because that's what they're built to do and is, in general, their best option. Of course, that's an exaggeration, and in particular the difference is more limited at early levels when PoE1 characters tended to have only 1-2 abilities available. It's also variable based on class and build, and for characters like Chanters who replenish resources over time, it tends to be untrue. But hopefully it gets across the point I'm trying to make: tying everything to a shared resource pool sounds good in theory, and it can be good in theory, but it can also encourage extreme specialization and one-trick pony builds. It''s also less of an issue for multiclass characters, since those tend to be two or even three-trick ponies just as a result of their two resource pools. Finally, from a design perspective, I'd personally be leery of it because it's really difficult to balance - and this brings us back to cases like Charge. See, if an ability exists in a vacuum, it can be tuned as an isolated function, i.e. "if Charge is usable x times than it should do y damage at level z." The fact that such an instance can be thought of in simple mathematical terms is tremendously valuable with respect to tuning it, because all the designer has to do is consider the context it occurs in, and then make sure the function is appropriate for that context. If there's a problem with Charge, that can be addressed, and then if there's a problem with Knockdown, that can be addressed. The two cases do create context for one another, but it's a limited context because the ability to use one does not come at the direct expense of the other. On the other hand, if all of a character's abilities draw from the same resource pool, a secondary consideration arises: the opportunity cost of using ability A instead of ability B, and more crucially, the player perception of that opportunity cost. In practice, unless fights really do prompt radically different styles of play, players are going to look at the cost of an ability and the effect of an ability and either say, "oh, wow, that's better than what I have right now, I'll use all of my resources on that instead," or, alternately, "oh, wow, that's not as good as what I have right now, I won't use any resources on that." If the developer then tunes it the other way, the player may change their conclusion, but the process of evaluating opportunity cost to determine worth still happens. This is why in games like Path of Exile, functional builds tend to have one skill for AoE, one skill for single-target, and buffs - they all draw from mana, so the only skills worth using are the ones that maximize either defense or DPS. It's not an inherently bad thing, but it is a thing I don't like in Pillars. Hopefully that provides some clarification on my perspective. Thank you for this post! I wondered why playing single-class felt so underwhelming (not from a power level perspective), and that's exactly it! If you have both Crippling Strike and Blinding Strike, you're going to compare both directly, and find that Blinding Strike is by no means twice as good as Blinding Strike, so you're going to use Crippling Strike exclusively. Once you add Gouging Strike, that reverses, and there is no real reason to use Crippling Strike anymore. I'm sure it was designed with the intention of giving players more flexibility, but it does exactly the opposite, at least for me. BTW by extension, it also shows which classes are less desirable. I find my Barbarian/Cipher Serafen constantly end up with 150+ focus because to use all the Barbarian abilities immediately feels superior to using Cipher Powers and waiting for them to take effect. Although on PotD + level scale up, the fight is usually over before I really get to cast anything big (same goes for Meteor Shower etc.)

<Insert obligatory joke equating Josh to Eothas> Hmm, that also includes just tearing it down and having someone else reinvent it.

Have ciphers cast Ectopsychic Echo on the your fighter, or have your priest cast Hand of Weal and Woe before the Charge, and then Charge again.

I'm pretty sure it's not the min/maxing; stats tend to have a lot less influence than people think (especially overvaluing negative numbers, of course). It's more about tactics/preparedness/understanding of the game mechanics/using synergies, and all that comes with experience.

No xp gain xp loss

I experienced the same issue, and I do have patch 1.1 already applied.