LampStaple

DoS2 was indisputably the most talked about fantasy rpg in the past couple of months I can't believe anybody who enjoys rpgs hasn't heard about it by now already o_O

In the "gimme your best and worst" thread posted by obsidian pretty much every reply had a complaint about spellcasting - I don't think anybody actually likes spellcasting as it is. I'd expect huge changes. I'm just like you, I enjoyed playing my bomb-ass archmage-feeling wizard in PoE 1 and I'd really love to play a spellcaster with the beautiful spell vfx in deadfire without feeling like I'm gimping myself.

Good: First thing, the game is so ****ing phenomenally beautiful. Like, if pillars 1 was a raw potato, deadfire is something really fancy and french. Spellcasting especially looks a lot better, which goes a long way to fulfilling the fantasy feeling. Mutliclassing weapon-based classes is tons of fun. All the unique effects of specialization/class specific skills means that unlike in pillars 1, martial characters can have some really interesting builds. Bad: Spellcasting. Other than the fact that spellcasting is weak (I have faith that it'll be balanced), per-encounter spellcasting fundamentally doesn't feel as good. Casters in dnd-style games are usually resource-management types of characters, and that's what makes them so damn fun to play - rationing the gadgets you have in your toolbelt, gauging encounters, saving your resources and going all-out in a boss fight...the per-rest spells make "easy" encounters mentally engaging when you try to figure out the most efficient use of your spells, and it makes boss fights or otherwise difficult fights feel amazing when you go all-out and empty your spellbook. That was by far my favorite experience in pillars 1. Martial classes, on the other hand, are about consistent power - don't need resources to swing a sword. This differentiates the playstyles of casters and martial classes - obviously there are middle grounds like chanters and ciphers who can constantly generate resource, but the playstyle feels very different. Homogenizing the playstyles feels almost like undoing the versatility that multiclassing provides. That's my main complaint - I love playing casters and casters are just unfun. Unloading your strongest spells every encounter feels bad. Imagine if at the end of pillars 1 you just cast storm of holy fire every time you met a beetle. You wouldn't feel as badass casting storm of holy fire on Thaos.

initial observation: am not gonna waste your time by suggesting other templar combos is superior. if you wanted to play a priest o' berath/goldpact knight you woulda' mentioned such, no? point out advantages o' other templar combos is silly. as boeroer notes, the beta is hardly the final say on builds as there will be changes before final release to priests and paladins, and we only have 'bout 1/2 levels and powhaz and such. converse, if the class playstyle radically changes 'cause o' powers available late in game, then the developers made a mistake, and such mistakes is one o' the common poe errors the developers is trying to avoid repeating in poe 2. as such, we got a good notion o' the general strengths and weaknesses o' goodie two-shoes templar as you envision. sure, with beta feedback from 2/14/18 you won't know all the absolute bestest exploits and synergies at this point, but only a few hardcore build monkeys genuine play the game at the margins. however, am also go .... am knowing folks like a level-by-level rundown o' builds. is a mistake in our opinion to limit self to a build. am knowing with all the possible choices it seems obvious there is more opportunities to choose wrong. also, if you listen to beta folks you get the impression that any number o' weapons and abilities is horribly broken and sucky. don't be discouraged. takes horribly bad luck to make character choices which will cause a genuine fail, and there will be a respec option regardless. also, when beta folks claim stuff is broken or sucky, they is tending towards hyperbolic. there is better _____. spells, weapons, synergies all is having bests and worsts, but genuine bad and fail stuff is rare. HA! Good Fun! Great, thorough post, but what's with the overuse of contractions? It made an otherwise great post really difficult to read

What if you don't like stealth mechanics and don't want to go through such a tedious process before every fight to make even thinking about using a caster worth it? This is essentially prebuffing when the entire point of having buffs be restricted to being cast in-combat was to avoid the tedium of having to go through bull**** every time you want to god damn kill things.

holy **** this is ridiculously fun and holds up on veteran difficulty too.

The problem is by the time you're done casting all your buffs you get to cast like one more spell and then spend the rest of the combat auto attacking.

That's true. When I made my mercenary wizard, she only picked spells that can lower armour and such - so my meta knowledge made me roll a debuff mage, which normally would have been most counter-intuitive. And I do think Penetration becomes so problematic when it is this simple, but big threshold which you need to climb over in a number of combat situs. Since grazes have become a luxury, the AP system needs to accommodate for that and be more forgiving, and in that way give us back grazes in disguise. Weird. In the game's current state, CC and debuff spells seem much more attractive than damage spells. Damage spells are defended by 2 mechanics (defenses to see if it hits, then armor for damage calculation) while CC/debuffs only need to pass one check. Not to mention the time it takes to cast a fireball that does 15 damage because langddfueaudfuath have way too much armor could have been spent auto-attacking if you were a martial class to do 40 damage per hit. Being a blaster is completely useless in the beta and I really hope they change it.

I'm happy you were happy. I wasn't happy. My wizard didn't do anything in most fights, and that made him feel useless and weak. To me, Vancian magic makes wizards feel like wimpy computer programmers, not mighty masters of magic. It's not like wizards hit that much harder than the other classes. They hit slightly harder, and in return they barely got to fight at all. According to the Devs spells are actually intended to be more powerful in PoE2 than they were in PoE1, balanced by the drawbacks that (1) casting times are longer, (2) interrupts are more powerful, and (3) you have fewer spells you can cast per individual combat than in PoE1. Right now, playing wizards feels terrible, but that's just a tuning issue. We need grazing, or something equivalent. I like the design, which allows me to cast more often, and cast more powerfully. I was pretty meh about empower until I actually started using it. It's not somehow a replacement for problems with the wizard class, but it does feel great to use. Do you have a link to the devs saying that spells are intended to be more powerful with longer cast times/stronger interrupts? If they do end up tuning casters that way, I'd be fine, I'm just disappointed that casting fireball at an opponent is roughly equivalent to building up a large sneeze at them and I attributed that to the fact that casters are no longer limited by per-resources. In any case, I'm still disappointed that they homogenized ALL casters by turning them into per-encounter casters. I still very much believe they could have achieved a balance in different casting styles to appeal to different players; clearly, there are tons of people who prefer per-encounter, but there are also people who enjoy per-rest. I stand by my opinion that Wizards should be a per-rest style caster; Wizards embody the archetype of a caster who is meticulously preparing and planning and just spamming per-encounter spells doesn't feel wizard-y. A Druid's "nature" themes would make sense as a per-encounter caster. There's plenty of room for different styles of unique casting - after all, Ciphers and Chanters are already unique casters in that they generate resources to cast spells, while Druid, Priest, and Wizard all cast spells from a finite pool of resources. I don't think it'd be unreasonable to at least take ONE of those three homogenized casting styles and switch them from per-encounter resources to stronger per-rest resources - after all, they feel a bit same-y right now and this would be a great way of mechanically differentiating the themes of the casters.

I'm surprised you don't like the fire godlike. He looks badass to me - in PoE, they looked sorta like volcanic turds, but they really polished the models in this game. The fire godlike preset in the beta looks like a ballin' bronze god.

In Pillars 1, playing a caster really did feel like you were playing a badass mage. And while tons of people hated that spells were per-rest, I think per-rest spellcasting was what allowed casters to feel so amazing. When all your spells are per-encounter, your highest level spells feel underwhelming. There's no reason not to unleash your full arsenal of strongest spells every fight. This makes casting powerful spells feel mundane. Imagine if in pillars 1 you casted minor avatar and storm of holy fire every fight... The empower system does not nearly come close to emulating this feeling. First of all, you're boosting the spell's EFFECTS and not casting a better spell. Having your numbers be slightly more inflated in a boss fight doesn't feel like anything because bosses have inflated numbers too. In addition to the numbers, it's the spell's effects, the animations, and the consumption of scarce resources (high level spell slots) that makes casting a high level spell feel impactful. Not only that, but the fact that all spells are per-encounter means that the spells' effectiveness seems to have been drastically lowered (damage and debuff spells are near useless but enchantment buffs are incredibly powerful, but I'm just going to write that off as beta balance. I have faith that this will be balanced by release). High cast times and low reliability on most spells makes sense given that they're per encounter, but why be per-encounter in the first place? Spellcasters are traditionally balanced around having scarce resources but powerful effects for spending those resources. Since spellcasts are per-encounter now, that means they're just mediocre effects for spending common resources. Obsidian, I'm begging you to reconsider making all spellcasters per-encounter spellcasters. The resource system of caster classes and non-caster classes feel so homogenized right now that I can barely tell the difference between playing a paladin and playing a wizard. At least split the casters into per-encounter casters and per-rest casters to appease both the people who enjoy being able to blow their load every fight as well as the people who enjoy resource management and being able to pop off in boss fights with spells they can't afford to cast in more mundane encounters.

+50% to get phrase when you do a melee crit and offensive invocations cost -1 phrase. -not offensive invocations cost +1 phrase. It is a "weapon Crit" in CharGen. Are we sure it only works in melee? I think it is basically all Crits from weapons. So, a Skald could be an archer as well as a melee Character. At least that is how I have read it. It only works in melee. In character creation it says all crits, so I figured, hey I'll make a blunderbuss-wielding skald and get tons of phrases but the in game description specifically mentions melee. Inconsistent descriptions in character creation.

I'm pretty sure power level affects the penetration of the spells and not the damage. You'll notice it if you try to mc and cast a spell. I was hitting for 50 damage with fan of flames on a single classed character, and a multiclassed character simply can't hit over 17 because you won't have enough penetration. I really don't like the penetration system, especially since there are no means of boosting your penetration, it means multiclassed character simply CAN NOT cast offensive spells.

From my experience so far, it means that you can't multiclass as a caster if you want to do any damage with your spells because your spells being cast at a lower power level means your spell penetration will always be significantly lower than your enemy's armor class. Shame, I wanted to mc a paladin with an offensive caster, "templar" and "arcane knight" and "liberator" all sound like offensive classes but you literally do a third of the damage a pure caster does.

After completing the game a couple of times on PoTD without Trial of Iron, I decided I'd go for the triple crown achievement. I don't wanna get merked by the ghosts at caed nua, is there a way I could hit level 4 before caed nua? What's the safest order of quest completion?