MarkTheDP

I used to play Warhammer so I may be a little biased... But yes, those faces look hilarious.

I would love to be able to do such comparisons but too be frank its too time consuming do to irl constraints. The best I can do atm is giving educated guesses backed up by limited tests. Therefore most of my time spent testing has been with weapons with complex mechanics. Essence Interrupter is one of the weapons I would really love to do a full run with, but its so new I haven't had time to do anything more then quick tests (where my initial assumptions were quite flawed). As a side note its very hard to conclude why your EI user is doing more dmg then your Red Hand user. You mentioned he was a Geomancer which might mean he is spending time throwing out debuffs and CC resulting in lower dps. Another factor can be which weapons you chose to upgrade first, which might skew the results one way or the other. The three most likely sources for error is probably that I have vastly underestimated the usefulness of the summons (which might end up adding a lot of dmg), my understanding of the relative strengths of a Hunting Bow vs Arquebus might be flawed, and three that your Beastmaster might have a more dps oriented build and is built more towards the Strenght of a Hunting Bow then your Geomancer is. From my experience (Done multiple runs with The Red Hand) The best 3 classes for this weapon is Ranger because of Gunner, Assassin due to Assassinate beeing so much stronger on slow 2hs, and Chanter because of Sure-Handed Ila Nocked Her Arrows with Speed (but it does turn the build into a utility build resulting in lower dps for the character but higher dps for the party).I've noticed in quite a few of your responses to people you tend to assume there are all sorts of other factors at play other than what the poster mentioned. Were there other factors that could have significantly influenced damage, I would have mentioned them. Please don't assume people are idiots and throwing out comparisons without taking such things into account. My Beastmaster (the EI user) uses exactly two spells, natures mark and insect swarm. Insect swarm targets Fort and therefore does very little damage in PotD Upscaled due to high fort (the average chance to hit is about 25%, i throw it on big groups and am lucky to get 2 hits tops). Natures Mark affects my whole team. My Geomancer uses Merciless Gaze and Combusting Wounds, thats it. If anyone is getting more damage out of spells, its the Red Hand user. If my Geomancer was spending half her time doing debuffs and CC I would have taken that into account in my post. As you may have noticed Natures Mark and Insect Swarm have vastly longer cast times than Merciless Gaze and CW. Additionally, my Beastmaster is the main party healer (although heals are rarely used in a well built party). Advantage: Red Hand Additionally, my game has the significant "EI doesn't summon correctly" bug. I get a summon once in a blue moon, seriously maybe one or two per day of playing. Admittedly there's no way you could have known this, but had my EI user been getting a lot of damage from summons I would have taken that into account. She gets practically no damage from summons at all, given their extreme rarity in my game. I'm not a moron, both builds are tuned towards the respective weapons being used. Were there differences in gear upgrades I would have said so. Edit: I would say a big thing you havnt taken into account is the simple fact that (especially on PoTD) AR is the single greatest damage mitigator in the game. EI has the massive advantage of doing Pierce/Shock (although this seems buggy. Ive witnessed multiple fights where EI targets pierce despite the target having lower shock AR). Much like in PoE1, weapons that deal /elemental are absolutely amazing.

More enemies with unique abilities/enemies using more abilities. Dominating Gaze makes Fampyrs the only challenging non-boss enemies in the entire game. Honestly I'd like to see that prioritized before anything else, personally. The game is simply not difficult past level 10-12 with the SOLE exception of Fampyrs.

I happen to be running a party with two rangers (I know I know, but you gotta make the game challenging somehow right?), one with Essence Interrupter and one with Red Hand. The essence interrupter ranger does about 1.25x the damage of the Red Hand ranger. The Red Hand ranger is also a geomancer and thus has access to buffs the Beastmaster EI ranger does not, although this is probably canceled out by the fact that the Beastmaster is using miscreants leather. I really don't think you should be making these lists if you arent willing to do such direct comparisons before putting a single weapon alone in "God Tier."

Yep. I also sympathize with the OP, and I'm in an almost identical situation, shelving the game after level ~14. Without a strategic layer of spell loss, ability loss and hitpoint loss, and not having a replacement for those, the game was never capable of producing the layered difficulty of its predecessors. And once you're hitting levels where you have a dozen or more core abilities to burn every battle for every character -- not to mention all the stuff you can acquire from gear -- it's only possible to generate difficulty in the "boss fights". And even then, it isn't easy. Let it be a lesson for future developers. Sometimes the things that players complain about as "tedious" in the game are the parts that allow true challenge to emerge. I disagree that the problem lies in abilities being per-encounter. Tyranny had a similar system and was generally more difficult than PoE2 and PoE1 IMO. Its entirely possible to create more in-depth and difficult fights with what Obsidian has to work with, without just adding more enemies and increasing health pools. What gives me hope is Fampyrs. I think Dominating Gaze is a bit overdone but it has workarounds and makes fights intricate and challenging. Clearly obsidian is capable of making fights difficult through the creative use of abilities, they just need to do it more. I've never seen an enemy priest use supress affliction on his own allies, or a paladin use aegis of loyalty, or half the other debuff-removers available in the game. Hell Ogre groups were deadly in PoE1 because of insect-swarm, whens the last time an Eoten cast a spell on you? The problem with PoE2 stems not from our increased access to abilities in each encounter, but from the combination of that with a general decrease to enemy use of abilities. Enemies pretty much use offensive abilities, the occasional buff, and on rare occasion a debuff.

That's not the ice dragon, that's a low level water dragon. How is he low level if it has 3 red skulls? Noneless I shouldnt be able to solo it so easilyI think he meant low level as in not supposed to be difficult, and typically encountered at the level youre at rather than late-game. Ice dragon generally refers to the final boss of the DLC. The water dragon isn't so much supposed to be a boss as a mildly difficult enemy in a mid-game quest. If you know your classes well mildly difficult enemies generally become very easy in the current state of the game. I agree the game is generally too easy, but the water dragon isn't exactly meant to be tough. Its been stuck in a cage for hundreds of years having its energy siphoned off to power a guild. Nemnok has been actively growing in power with a whole cult of islanders helping him, and should naturally be more difficult.

Considering this issue has been known for a while and not fixed in any recent patches I figured I might as well make a mod that fixes it myself. Hopefully anyone else encountering this problem finds this thread via google. The mod changes Bonded Grief to be removable by resting. Here is the bug-fix mod on the Nexus

Pretty much this (emphasis mine). Single classes should have the major incentive of unlocking the high-tier spells and abilities, unfortunately most of them are pretty sub-par. Wizards and priests are decent, but only decent. I still found myself using the lower-tier abilities more often for those classes, and exclusively for every other class.

I'd recommend a better ship, the combat is generally easy enough without upgrades. That being said, there's no need to get the best ship. I used a Dhow for my entire playthrough (with maxed hulls and sails, and only the strongest 4-turn reload cannon) and was able to beat every other ship in the game. IMO faster jibes and quick-to-reload cannons beat out the big slow ships with ease.

When talking to Maia's pet for the first time she takes a "hope" towards you, I believe this is meant to be "hop."

Description: Maia currently has the debuff Bonded Grief permanently. I've tried all the methods for fixing this that I could find (I've encountered this bug before but its usually fixable by on of these methods). This includes dismissing then re-adding her to my party, manually killing her with other party members, killing her companion, killing both her and her companion at the same time, etc. This seems to be related to a secondary bug: Occasionally (about once a day) one of my rangers will have their companions become stuck. They suddenly stop moving and can't be issued commands. This persists through exiting the game, and is only resolvable by killing them. Upon killing them I frequently get a "sticky" bonded grief debuff that I have to take care of by then killing the ranger themself. It was after going through this process that Maia got stuck with a bonded grief debuff that flat out won't go away. Dropbox File of Save Game Steps to Reproduce this Bug: Unfortunately the "stuck animal companion" bug that requires killing the companion (which then causes the "sticky" bonded grief debuff) seems to happen completely randomly.

I usually hate "git gud" responses but cmon. The game is easy enough that you absolutely don't have to min-max in any way shape or form to beat it on PoTD. You don't have to be an expert on the supposedly "ever changing rulebook (what exactly changed in the last patch that suddenly makes the game much harder? I don't see anything). I'm certainly no expert at the game, and it was plain boring at higher levels. I use only story companions, so there was no min-maxing going on. Hell i didn't even use AI scripts. I never even look at the combat log. Its not a complex game. The mechanics have been simplified enough since PoE1 that everything is intuive. Have a affliction, cast an inspiration. Blind ranged enemies. Heal if you're taking damage. That formula beats 99% of fights without needing to spend "hours poring over the combat log." The lack of difficulty on PoTD seriously kills the replay value, and I hope they keep pushing it further up. Play on a lower difficulty if its too hard for you.

No replies to this? I'm having the same issue, my essence interrupter has caused exactly 0 summons in the past two days. I've seen the debuff on dozens of enemies, but I'm getting no summons.

I've been having quite a few since the new patch. Notably far more frequent "stuck" combat indicators. Things like health or damage numbers, afflictions, and inspirations get stuck on the screen after combat ends. I also can no longer fight the Guardian of Ukaizo, he does his dialogue then never appears.

Glad I used the search bar - I'm having this issue as well.