cheesevillain

And I've had no problem hitting each and every dialogue skill check in the beta for all 9 dialogue skills, so long as I balance my party's dialogue skills. If anything, I'd say the skill challenges are too low currently. Also, the whole design philosophy of PoE1 and 2 is that the story has enough non-linearity that it takes several playthroughs to find every thread. You're not going to be punished for not focussing on metaphysics, you'll just have the game not treat you as if you have expertise on animancy and the nature of the universe. And I won't get to feel like a sneaky wise-guy if I don't focus on streetwise and bluff. And that's a cool thing I love about these games.

All of the other casters have much fewer casts-per-combat than they did in PoE1, which actually makes Ciphers look all the more attractive in PoE2.

You can do that easily with Rogue, Monk, Cipher, Fighter, Barb, etc. The Ranger D&D class is just a fighter with a different skin. Drizzt is a fighter. Aragorn is just a fighter. They may be called Rangers in universe, and have the hunter background and high stealth & survival skills. Similarly, not every professional priest in the PoE universe is part of the Priest class. Asking for a PoE Ranger without a pet is like asking for a Cipher without psychic powers, because Cipher is a character in Warhammer 40k and he doesn't have psychic powers. I have tried, and succeeded at making an effective melee ranger in the Beta. The class is good, but it is not fun. It feels bad that wounding shot doesn't work in melee. The Stalker subclass is useful for a melee build, but doesn't feel very distinct from the base class. I find it weird that the subclass gives a bonus to defence to the Ranger, but the Ranger mostly has damage dealing abilities.

Helwalker Update: The class can be really brutal multi-classed with the normal Cipher class and ESPECIALLY with the Cipher subclass. Pairing it with the Soulblade (which requires melee range to use, and makes the Helwalker very vulnerable) is less effective, but does make for suicidally goofy fun. Now this isn't clear at all, but Helwalkers start combat with a wound for each power point they have. A single class Helwalker at the maximum level would start with 9 wounds. Upon playing a little more, it makes sense for monks to have two pools to fuel their abilities, because (a) wounds ten to get eaten up really fast, and (b) the mortification abilities are actually designed to help give you wounds. Swift Strikes helps a Shattered pillar quickly gather wounds for example. Blade Turning helps a Dance of Death build avoid getting hit, so it can keep gathering wounds. The monk class tree has a lot more depth in builds than I initially thought, but this is only obvious once it hits power level three, which is a gruelling level seven for multiclass players. Anyone playing a multi class monk in the beta isn't going to get a real sense of what it's like at the starting level of 6.

Well, it also stops certain effects from stacking. You can't benefit from the Tenacious effect twice.

By allowing respecs, like the did in the first game. Also, by adding a tutorial note warning novice players about the potential difficulty. Easy enough to do.

The old system certainly wasn't perfect. It scaled really, really weirdly. I also found it deceptively hard to judge at a glance exactly how effective your weapons would work against an enemys' armour, especially when it was bound up with the miss/graze/hit/crit process. You say it's simple, but it's only simple on paper.

You can still use new spells you find in Grimoires, and switch Grimoires before a difficult fight to switch up your spells. There's a better Grimoire than the one your wizard starts with near Tikawara, which you should probably pick up before doing the dungeon on a high difficulty.

Now that is some armour fit for the Vailian Republic!

It must be a bug/oversight. You should be able to import all the essential elements of your PoE1 character.

Yup, I think it's called "Dance of Death", and it currently seems absurdly overpowered. I think there was a bug making it give me a wound every second, so that I reached maximum might really quickly. Let's be honest, we'll all be disappointed because our monks won't have flaming fists, and they'll never, ever look as cool without 'em. Turning wheel would feel great on a Helwalker, but I don't think it'd be overpowered. Helwalkers probably shouldn't be in close combat, but that's why it'd be so fun if an ability like turning wheel tempted you to try.

In PoE1, the Rogue had 12 abilities, and 11 rogue-specific talents. In the 5 out of 9 levels we've seen in PoE2, we have 7 abilities, 11 upgrades that customize abilities, and 10 rogue-specific talents. So I don't agree that the ability tree is thin, even if I disregarded the three subclasses which change fundamentally how the class plays. I don't accept that the trees are railroaded. Now certainly, some of them have obvious holes which need to be patched up, like the Priest and Ranger trees. In PoE1, you could use general talents to push your character outside of its conventional path. I think that weapon proficiencies are a partial substitute for that. I also think that the expanded skills do a lot more to make your character unique in and outside combat. I can't argue with that, and I would also welcome some general use talents, especially for RP reasons. People need to feel like they can create any character they want, and goof around doing crazy things. The weapon proficiencies do a lot, but they are fairly bland, so even if I'm changing how my character plays, I don't feel like I'm changing who my character is. Sorry for surgically removing some parts of your post, but there's a lot of substance there, and I can't respond to it all at once.

You got to choose the weapon, but the choice was largely irrelevant because most weapons work the same way, as they do in most games. It's always been unfair how two wizard spells like fireball and blizzard work differently, but an axe and a sword largely work the same. I mean, you wouldn't say that the "choice is being made for you" if the blizzard spell slowed down enemies, and the fireball didn't. People think it's cool that fire and ice are work differently, and there's a meaningful choice, not a cosmetic one. Weapon choices in the first game were largely cosmetic. Universal choices are not always good choices. I agree with you that it sucks that Rangers don't have more melee capability, and since the Stalker subclass is melee focussed, I've got to believe that's something the devs are planning to fix. The Wounding Shot especially sucks. It felt great in PoE1 when a melee Ranger engaged an enemy and used Wounding Shot, while the companion got behind and enjoyed bonus damage from Predator's Sense and Merciless Companion.

I've noodled around with the Helwalker, and while it is a glass cannon, it sure doesn't feel weak to me when I've played it. It's especially mean when multi-classed, say, with a Cipher or a Sharpshooter. You have to remember that buffs stack more easily in PoE2. So the Helwalker can simultaneously enjoy the buff to his might from his wounds, as well as from a priest, and so forth. It's not hard to get him shooting arrows like thunderbolts. It's also just dandy that we now have a ranged monk build, which we did not have in the first game.

Well, it's supposed to be a depressing place.

It provides more options in the sense that you have the option whether or not to activate the modal every combat, and within combat, whereas most of the general talents were passive. We also get more options period. In PoE1, say, a fighter got one talent/ability every level. Now that fighter gets 1 every level, but also gets a weapon proficiency every 4 or so levels. He gets more stuff overall. See, here we have a choice with interesting strategic depth. Do you use a war axe modal or use wounding shot with a ranged weapon to activate wounding shot? And that question will becomes more interesting in context, e.g. if you find a Unique War Axe you love. The options with the new weapon proficiencies are much more interesting options.

It's called weapon proficiency, it contains like half of POE1 general talents. This isn't quite true, but it's close. There were 45 general talents in PoE1 base game. There are 31 Weapon Proficiencies in PoE2. The 6 weapon focus talents and 5 modal fighting talents are rolled into the weapon proficiencies. Some of the other talents are rolled into the weapon proficiencies as well. The Hold the Line talent gave extra engagement, and now the halberd modal does the same. Superior Deflection is replaced by the dagger modal. We don't have weapon and shield style, but now there are three different shield modals to choose from, and 12 single weapon modals to mix & match. This isn't perfect, but I have to say I really like most of the modals, and I would try most of them with most classes, and they've done a whole lot to differentiate classes I've made while building them. In contrast, the pool of general talents in PoE sometimes felt like a trash dump, and most of them were not fun or useful with most classes. There were talents like field triage and wound binding that could have been recovery items, not talents. An elemental resistance talent such as "Secrets of Rime" should have been an enchanted cloak, or the reward for the Rymrgand mission. There were 5 talents like "Beast Slayer" which I bet were mostly used by power gamers who respecced his classes before, say, a difficult dragon fight. And of course, there were talents that should have been class-specific but weren't. Bloody Slaughter should have been for Barbs, Shot on the Run should have been for Rangers, and Envenomed Strike DEFINITELY should have been for rogue. Remember how cruddy it was that the PoE rogue capstone ability was playing dead? There's someone out there who made a pale elf from the White that Wends playing a Priest of Berath (but he pretends its a priest Rymrgand) and the class wouldn't be complete without "Secrets of Rime". I feel bad for that guy, but we're not missing generalized talent tree. What IS a problem is that some classes have specific holes that need to be filled. The Priest of Skaen and Stalker subclasses should both be melee capable, but they don't have the abilities they need to be played that way.

You might be able to run it through wineskin. It's a freeware virtual machine that simulates a windows environment inside a Mac. I might be in the same boat as you guys soon. My only pc is decaying quickly, and my only other computer is a MacBook.

That's what it says if cheats aren't enabled, right? Sometimes I've had to enter "iroll20s" twice to get it to work. A lot of the beta-backers aren't going to know what to do with the console commands anyways. I hope they add more money, & bombs/traps/weapons/shields to the shops, because it's difficult to test those systems right now.

Agreed. I'm loving the 4 or so new ways for monks to get wounds. It should really open up the class to many single-class and multi-class builds, but there's not all that much to do with those wounds. In the early levels, you can use Torment's reach and Force of Anguish, which are good abilities, but I'm finding there's not a whole lot of synergy with them and some classes. (of course, those wounds are usefull for Helwalkers. Helwalker/Rogue is a really mean combination.) Do you guys really think we need both a wound pool and a mortification pool?

Can we have more bombs and traps and so forth to play with? Or at least the correct item codes to summon them through the console?

(There's a LOT of unsubstantiated guesswork in this post) Okay, I checked, and the map goes from 9 degrees north to 39 degrees south, and from 30 degrees East to 69 degrees East. If Eora matches Earth in size, then we're talking an area 5400 km long, and 4300 wide. The area is 22 million square km. For context, the land area of South America is 17 million square km, and Africa is 30. This is a BIG area! So, I'm a little uneasy with ships & travel times, so take it is on me. It takes our little ship 64 hours to travel from the western edge to the eastern edge on the map of ours. If our boat is, say, going continuously an unrealistically fast pace 9 knots, then it passes over a distance of 1200 km. That would make this map about 1/13th of the total world map. Our travel speed on our stout-looking ship is probably not that fast, and the total map is therefore probably larger than that too.

I'll eat a fully grown, rampaging elephant if this isn't the case. They wouldn't implement pirate attacks on the open sea that injure your companions and crew if you couldn't heal between them.

The devs have mentioned that they will do this if possible. It's apparently a surprisingly large amount of work.

Is that a good thing? I'd say that's the sign of a terrible mechanic. I experienced this too. The shame is that I don't even check what injury my character has received by the second injury. The loss of health is too great. Ideally, I should be tempted strongly at injury 2, and tempted just a little at injury 3, that I can juuuuust make it through the next fight without resting. And maybe I do, or maybe I don't. That's a choice that's meaningful and feels good to get right, and once in a while, to get wrong. But right now I rest automatically at injury 2, even at lower difficulties. The new system is really cool, but it needs to be less punishing.