RPG Fan

I hope they really look into the spells/abilities/talents which are under performing and should be changed for pillars of eternity 2. One that comes to mind is the wizard first level touch spells (Jolting Touch, Kalakoth's Sunless Grasp), the damage is very weak and you take too much risk by moving your mage within melee range. Another example is Rolling Flame , which makes it hard to control since the game is isometric so it is not easy to ensure it bounces back to the enemies.)

This was never really true, and is definitely not true now. People put way too much stock into having optimised, min-maxed attributes, but the way PoE's attributes scale it's nowhere near as important as it has been in other CRPGs. Moreover story companions are a level higher than custom ones, and this far outweighs the negatives of having unoptimised attributes, particularly in the early game which is the hardest part of the game. It is not so much now because after some patches we were able to fully respec story companions to fully customize their level progression, but initially this was not possible and thus made the game harder to complete in path of the damn using only story companions. We can now fully respec them, however their initial attributes are set in stone and cannot be changed, which limits the way they can be used as you respec or level progress with them. The game favors min-max attributes, since you can easily compensate for the lack of certain attributes while focusing on other ones which are meaningful to the class and playstyle you seek, that is why you are allowed to leave some of them very low and still have a competent character.

Care to elaborate? Maybe by balancing the scripted checks to more attributes instead of being mainly restricted to only a few of them like perception.

chanter are beast. they can solo the game well others can to but they are not weak. You may not find them fun some did some didnt but they are not weak. No you dont need certain attributes. this is a roleplaying game you dont get to pass every check yourself. there are checks for every attribute so you cant possibly have them all high (unless you meta game i suppose but thats not the point) you find a role for your character and play it out. That is the definition of choice you can have x attribute high or y attribute high so choose one. I hope they stress this more in the next game and i think they will with all the new skills they are adding. Its good you dont get to unlock every piece of content in a roleplaying game. It means there are actual choices to be made on how you build your character. That wizards are clearly better as melee is not true either. I have had dps leading wizards with wands or scepters. And they are monsters at cc. I am sorry your experience was off but balance wasn't one of the issues of pillars in fact there are whole threads devoted to hating on josh for too much balance which I don't agree with fyi. Chanters would only become useful if specific either invocations or phrases were carefully selected on each level upgrade, otherwise it was easy to make the build underperform and some of the phrases and even invocations were not very useful at certain levels (this happened on other classes too, but I felt chanters suffered more of this than other classes). The wizard damage dealing and control build is viable and powerful, but overall the melee wizard I felt was overpowered, level 1 spell of wizard with the staff was simply much more powerful than any other level one spell and remain as such for a long time. Later on the lance weapon spell i think on level 8 or so made the wizard so powerful than the rest of the spell from there on, were really not needed. It felt odd wizards would eventually become almost front line fighters, typically you would expect them to be fragile and third row damage dealers or crowd control type. Attributes checks, could be handled in another way, which could still give you a chance to pass them, without having to go against the builds you are trying to create, I feel that is still an area of opportunity for obsidian to explore and improve. I feel balancing is still needed since too many classes had many talents/abilities that underperform while other were too overpowered. Correct balancing is hard to achieve and will most likely also be needed in deadfire, since it is hard to predict how people will mix talents/abilities and now even classes in ways that might make a character too overpowered, or make a class underperfom and therefore rarely used by the users. Finally, I hope we are able to fully customize the story companions, since early on pillars of eternity you had to choose between going for an easier game mode or enjoying you companions and their backstory.

I have enjoyed pillars of eternity for the most part, however I wish some things were changed for pillars of eternity 2. Better overall balancing in regard to abilities for each of the classes is needed in pillars of eternity (some character abilities and combinations simply were useless) and would not like pillars of eternity 2 to repeat the same mistake. For example, some classes were simply too underpowered to really work in pillars of eternity (chanter comes to mind), also your main character needed certain high attributes (perception for example) to successfully pass certain script trigger checks during gameplay. This might go against the build you are trying to play , but you are almost forced to allocate some points into specific attributes or you will never pass the script checks during gameplay, I felt that left little room to the freedom of choice for the players. Finally, overall classes should make sense in terms of weapons and abilities. In pillars of eternity, wizard class was more powerful as a melee combat based wizard rather than going to the control or damage dealing wizard, which I feel did not felt right. It might make sense with the dual class being developed but overall each class should be biased toward a reasonable play style.