Camonge

They missed one thing: summon items still too strong. Please, do nerfhammer this.

Yay corpse eater now viable

POTD is mostly certainly compatible with RP. Id go rogue/ghostheart ranger. You hunted an elder bear and its spirit follows you now. Ghostheart is essentially a ranger summoner. Bear is tanky, and no engagement means it's super easy to flank. You could also try boar, resilient and smaller so more useful in close spots.

Great changes! Thanks

It's a guess. I would need to test it in multiple lvls to be sure. But it's not an overpenetrating issue. I was hitting with a greatsword, afterall. I think lash from Spiritual Weapon scales because Flames of Devotions kept doing 20% bonus fire dmg, while spiritual weapon made 30% bonus corrode dmg. Testing on the same attack, opponent had no special armor against these types.

I believe that's the case. I was dead worried about my templar of berath and ran some combats in 1.1beta: every time I used flames of devotion + spiritual weapon on a even armored enemy, corrode damage was higher. At character level 6, power level 2, Corrode lash is doing 30% dmg on normal attacks. Multiplicative. Btw, empower spiritual weapon has no effect on item scaling of spiritual weapon.

Nice,I always believed old vailia and aedyr shared the same continent.

Yup, we do not know if it's working as intended (JSawyer said level scaling on critical path might work differently). Fact is: enemies in engwithian ruins are scaling twice from level 3 to 4. Worth reporting in the bugs subforum.

About Boars and skulls: I just redone the area (potd, scaling upwards only). Entered engwith ruins at lvl 3: boars had 2 skulls, defs 52 65 41 46. Drakes 1 skull, defs 53 65 52 36. Before fighting them, I went to the training area and reached level 4. Moving back to ruins main area, they gained skulls ) one skull each and +6 to all defenses. I also find tavern mercs immersion breaking and I only ever recruit them in these situations (did it in gilded vale. Searching for Durance and Kana before finishing eothas temple and raedric hold felt metagamey all the same to me). I'm just cool with obsidian making it about available mechanics in this particular instance.

Let's put some things in perspective... We are talking about one single fight which you are expected to bring one single hireling. This does not make the whole game balanced around the requirement of hirelings. 15 minutes later, you have a full party of story companions and can forget about hirelings. It's a design choice for a one time thing, when you can take hirelings already but cannot have a full party of story companions yet. Designers had two options: trivialize the experience for 5 member parties that used the tavern, or make it insanely hard for 3 member parties without hirelings. According to my brief experience, they went for the middle ground: the fight is tuned for a 4 member party. About knownsastherat video, the harder fight awaits below with some young panthers and a drake in adittion to boars and wurms. Indeed, my boars had 3 skulls and were a bit tougher. https://imgur.com/a/YUPBfDt

I don't think that is the consensus at all. Please try to beat the ruins using a skald chanter as your PC and let me know how that goes Thanks for the tip! Done, it's fun spamming invocations and critting with mace. Made the hardest encounter on first island (pre-aloth fight) with a 4man party (swashbuckler edér, xoti contemplative, skald warden, and Seer hireling). Took me 4 reloads: fight at narrow ramp, bear+edér on choke, skald behind wih pistol spamming aoe stun, xoti on heal/xbow duty and seer shooting/resummoning bear/charming drake. I'm pretty confident it could be done on Trial of Iron with a second hireling crowd controlling (wizard or druid). Both Engiwithian pit fight and Gorecci street are not fair fights without hirelings. Which is fine by me: hirelings are 250gold each and it's only reasonable potd encounters are designed for a full party the moment you are able to make one.

Your tears of unfathomable nerfness are delicious! Jokes aside, is the consensus now POTD is properly tuned, at least in the first 10 levels? All I did was Benweth fight, took me a couple reloads, it was very fun and challenging. I believe ranged mobs positioning is key here. Remember White March open fights vs Endless paths chokepoints, and teleporting ondrites afterwards.

Josh sawyer confirmed empower is down to +5 power level bonus.

Yeah let's take a deep breath here. I do not want to believe infinite reproc and empower extravaganza are going to remain unchanged. Level scaling and # of enemies are the basics, you do not need a month to fix those.

I believe all those paid betas would be far more useful with focused troubleshooting. 'Ok, this week all betatesters are going to face some archmagi fights, made for testing purposes only". So they can actually test important stuff without spoling the game. I do not doubt betatesters effort, but it bugs me how glitched engagement and empowered spells went gold like this.

You can get max focus quick enough without multiclass. Weapon swap with guns, target weaker enemies first. I tried an ascendant/ranger (accuracy is gold here) in order to reliably reach max focus. It works fine, but I find myself missing the point of Ascendant this way.

Ascendant -> Soul shock spam -> great AoE. Beguiler -> Phantom Foes+Eye Strike (high int + affliction passive) -> very good sustained CC Soul blade -> great MC with martial classes, decent fit for death godlike, needs some micromanagement Cipher is harder to build, and no longer an OP class, but it's far from garbage now. Most early levels shred spells are a trap , maybe that's the reason they underperform at striker role for many users.

Use grapeshot and see AI spend the next 3 turns reporting crew up and down like a ****roach on fire. It's very effective crowd control. Grapeshot affects boarding, but in a smaller scale than minigame's. After making a few quick tests, I could reduce a small vallian boat boarding party from 9 to 7.

Yeah, this. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why people are singling out POE 2 for being too easy. I wouldn't be able to name a crpg that's harder than POE 1 & 2. Because it's new and people keep increasing expectation as they play new games. cRPG hasn't really been well known for its difficulty because this kind of playstyle only gets you once because you lack information. It's like how Darkest Dungeon is hard because you have to be either extremely unlucky or have bad comp. The moment you know what you're getting into and always stick to the same playstyle, it becomes derps easy. PoE is no different, 1 or 2. PoE 2 just give the player more freedom and the hardcore player hates that. Majority of the changes demanded are more of a "I want PoE 2 to be PoE 1 again, just with flashier graphic". While I mostly agree on the general cRPG issue, Deadfire is kinda different because they managed to design plenty memorable fights in the first game. So yeah, we would like to have experiences like these again. I just re-played PoE and I felt challenged in so many fights. Reaching as deep as I could in Endless paths at low levels, facing raedric, dragons, bounties, archmagi, spores, ondrites...

They just need to better articulate boarding and shooting phases. Anyone played nantucket? There are some fine environmental stuff there for naval combat.

Yeah rangers are fine. They make a very boring class, but far from weak. I believe OP list nailed it.

Did you try beta patch branch? I believe level scaling is working there.

White March was released 5 months after Pillars of Eternity 1. My only worry is that 3 DLCs at the same time won't be up to White March's quality. About balance: they are working on it, it's going to get better, but this game is NEVER going to be as balanced as the first. Because subclasses and multiclasses: it's too much complexity.

A) FUN. Chanters, specially troubadours, are very fun to play. Wizards are always cool. Ranger is the most boring class. Nothing to do here. B) EFFECTIVENESS. I think every class is strong enough. Martial classes are stronger overall but thats an encounter design issue to be fixed (too few mobs). Some classes are weaker initially but do get stronger later (cipher and druid have a plethora of weakling low level spells), while rangers have no use for high levels. I agree monks and chanters are asking for a nerf hammer. Paladin's defense boost is also too strong atm. C) SUBCLASSES BALANCING. Corspe eater. Such a cool concept, such a bad trade-off. Beguilers and illusionists are lacking. While troubadours can pretty much turn their weakness into a boon. D) CREATIVE BACKGROUND Swashbuckler is such a great interrupter, and thats what he should be. Goldpact/Berath templar is as awesome as it was discussed before in these forums: defender, striker, support and crowd control in a single char. Battlemage is great at improving wizards accuracy.

Why no votes for druids? I found druid spells very lacking