cheesevillain

By level 5, you can have Wounding Shot, Marked Prey, Concussive Shot and Evasive shot. That's 4 offensive abilities. That's more than 2-3. The Pet has one and only one ability that it uses itself: Takedown. If you want more, the Sharpshooter class basically has an always-on modal ability which switches based on where it's positioned on the battlefield. It's a lot of fun to play. The ranged Ranger is in a great place right now. It's fun to play, and it encourages and rewards cool strategies. Between managing the Ranger & the Pet, it can demand a fair amount of micromanaging as well, so using a Ranger is never boring.

I hope they concentrate their resources on anything, anything other than an eye colour shader. The graphics look gorgeous. You guys know there is already a huge number of portraits you can find online and import into the game, right? I love the new godlike looks, personally.

They did that in PoE too. Apparently he's some part of some kind of Dragon themed paladin order that we don't have access to. "Grumble"

Just merge recovery with reload like they did already, why would it be weird? I misread your question.

It'd feel really weird if guns and crossbows didn't have it. They're not modern semi-automatics.

I like this one better, even as I'm gnashing my teeth at the lack of grazing, pen/armor balance, etc. The weapon proficiencies are REALLY COOL. They look pedestrian, but they play really well, and distinctly from each other. You can modify your character in several ways between and during encounters. It makes every weapon type useful in a different way. I'm not selling as single unique weapon in my future playthroughs of deadfire. It's really satisfying to customize priests and druids now that you can, you know, actually customize their spell lists. The Wizard Grimoire change is really great. The new subclasses, abilities and talents for monks give them so many excellent and varied build options. Bombs, Traps, and stealth combat are really useful, and really fun.

You don't have static spells. A wizard still has more flexibility in choosing and changing their spells throughout the game and even in the middle of combat by switching Grimoires.

As far as I can tell, Evasive Fire, the upgrade to the Evasive Roll Ranger ability, currently doesn't work. The description is also unclear. The description currently reads "The Ranger immediately attacks a random enemy in Range". I'm unclear whether "immediate" means it cancels the attack time and/or the reloading time from the previous attack.

I've found this two. Sometimes the double animal companion is a ghost which doesn't interact, and sometimes it's a real critter which engages in combat and can be killed.

I'm not sure if this is a bug, but currently I find I cannot escape combat if I'm out of sight of the enemies. My sharpshooter/assassin can use escape & evasive roll to travel across the map and hide in a location where my enemies shouldn't be able to find me. Nevertheless, they can zero in on my character as if they had planted a tracking device on her. This is unfortunate, because the assassin subclass encourages cat-and-mouse style combat where you leave combat after killing one enemy and enter hunt the rest later. On the same note, enemy health regenerates when combat finishes, like player health. Is this a bug as well?

I love the large number of skills. It gives me a lot of freedom to make different types of characters. I also love that there are good reasons to pick active skills other than athletics.

Not all of us feel the same way. I already feel PoE2 is superior to the first one. Did you actually play Tyranny? PoE2 is not similar to it at all.

Ok, let's be fair. They have five different pets, and a LOT of stuff that let's you customize the pet. There are talents, there is a pet specific melee ability, and there are Ranger abilities like Heal Pet & the Wounded-Shot/Predator's-Sense Combo. You can make the pet a tank. You can make the pet a do DPS. You can keep the pet as a regular party member, or make the pet a more powerful temporary summon critter. The pet has received some serious love. The current problem is I can customize my Ranger's Bear more than I can customize my Ranger himself. The Bear almost seems more valuable than the Ranger. It's kind of like, if in PoE1, Me: Do I really want Sagani in my party? Eder: Her fox is so fluffy! Of course we need her in the party! Me: But if we have the fox, we need to include Sagani. I'm not sure I want to make that sacrifice. Eder: Don't ruin this for me, man! I NEEED TO HAVE THAT FOX!!!

I had a very different experience than you. If I wanted to play a character who could dodge & parry all attacks, I would choose Superior deflection, and then... I wouldn't feel any different. The effect was too small. The choice wasn't meaningful. Most of the General Talents were nerfed, passive non-choices that didn't make much difference for players. They were cool for some for RP reasons, and they were cool for power gamers who liked squeezing the last few points of juice for their builds, but the General Talents didn't do much for me. A large number of non-meaningful choices does not make an RPG good. Meanwhile, while now I can choose a class-specific talent every level, in PoE1 I could only make a class specific choice every other level. Unless I was a monk or a priest, in which case I couldn't barely make any; I couldn't even pick my own spells. I want to see more class options in deadfire, but hot damn it's satisfying to finally see a Priest of Berath play differently from a Priest of Eothas, and to be able to choose to make a druid focus on healing my allies or rotting the flesh off my enemies.

Picking one time of elemental wildstrike closes off the others normally, but a player can select two if they have two choices in the same level-up. The modal for the Rapier incorrectly describes its effects. Currently, it looks like it has the same description as the half-sword. I'm not sure if this is a bug, but a mutliclass such as Druid/Monk can enjoy Bear's Fortitude, Snakes Reflexes and Bull's Will twice. The effects currently stack.

Just checked, and Transcendent Suffering isn't active if you're a bear. Or, you know, some lame animal that isn't a bear. It's a little bittersweet. I understand why that they probably shouldn't stack, but the Shifter/monk combination is tempting because the monk thrives on taking damage, and the Shifter heals so much damage.

The roll isn't an offensive ability, it's an escape-from-engagement ability. It's upgrade lets you attack while escaping, but only with ranged weapons. The Roots ability is also designed to help you avoid combat. It can be used by a melee character to position the battlefield, but its not the most natural use of the ability. If marked prey is a "support ability", then the Barbarians frenzy is also "support ability". Their only purpose is to shred enemies into bloody chunks, so I'll continue to label them as offensive abilities. Marked prey gives an offensive bonus to both Ranger and Pet. Some people are so focussed on the petless Ranger that they consider it to be a pet ability.

Some people want to play a Ranger that is a melee combatant that fits side-to-side with their animal friend. Currently, my pet can be great in melee, and can be great in a number of different ways. That's fantastic. My ranger can't be. There's exactly one ability for the melee ranger, which Marked Prey. They cannot use Wounded Shot, Concussive Shot. They can use Evasive Roll, but it has little use for the melee ranger, and it's upgrade Evasive Shot only works with ranged weapons. Takedown, Heal Companion and Master's call are all pet related abilities. They don't make my ranger better in melee. Binding Roots also doesn't make my ranger better at melee, and many people dislike the magical nature of the ability for a their martial non-magic character. That's one ability useful for melee rangers for the 5 levels we've seen. It's useful for a DPS build. There's a melee ranger subclass, the Stalker. It gives a bonus to defence, and is useful for making tank build. These class options are insufficient and incoherent. There is one melee build I can cobble together. There is no variety. Making and playing a melee ranger is currently awkward and unfun.

Well, it's pretty difficult to do things while you're blind! Rogues and Ciphers both get the ability to blind things from low levels. You're right, blind is a really effective affliction, and it goes a long way to make both of the classes feel fun and distinct early on in the game.

Agree. It needs a heavy tweaking. However, the new system is easier to understand and more elegant, and it makes the value of different types of damage (slash, pierce, burn) easier to understand.

They're already balanced around that, because (a) you're wizard only gets to cast spells a few times per combat, (b) they take a long damn time to cast, and © they're easy to interrupt during that long casting time, even with the reduction of interrupting in the game. In exchange for that, wizards should be hitting reliably and hitting hard. AOE spells also have the drawback that they can hit your own team if you're not careful, so making them more powerful contains a hidden drawback.

It's unclear without a reference to look things up, but I'm already finding it much easier to counter hostile status effects.

The devs are more likely to see this if you put this in the Bugs forum.

Empower feels fine. I agree that wizards and other offensive per-encounter casters have problems, and Empower is not the answer to them.

So...melee rangers are designed around being super boring? Yes. They are effective, yet boring. They would be a lot less boring if they'd let all their abilities be used with melee attacks.