giftmefood

Good Point!

The fact that soloing doesn't feel like gimping yourself doesn't change the fact that it is exactly the same principle: you are deliberately restricting yourself in order to improve your gameplay experience. There is no grand difference between leaving out party members and leaving out certain skills or consumables. The "I get all the loot and money" argument is just hogwash. There is plenty of good loot and money to go around so that's hardly much of a difference, and in any case: you control the entire party, if you want to give all the best loot to your own character and distribute whatever remains among the party. Secondly, I have at no point in this thread disputed that Arcana and Alchemy are powerful (though "completely failed to deliver" is just nonsensical hyperbole). I have in fact quite explicitly not disputed this. But that is not the point. The question is not whether Obsidian screwed up or not, nor whether they will fix this at some point or not. The question is how players bothered by these issues are responding to it, and why. Because let's assume as a hypothetical that the officially released game as it stands at the current 1.1 version is it: there will be no more updates, and the option for modding doesn't exist. There are balance issues that some people, such as yourself, are clearly bothered by. As the game is it its fixed and final state, there are therefore two main options: - make some relatively simple changes to how you play (eg. putting no points in the Alchemy skill, using poisons and potions as is) to create a more balanced and enjoyable game play experience for yourself - whine about how the game is broken, bemoan the evil fate that has befallen you, curse the Obsidian Gods, and generally take no responsibility whatsoever for improving your own lot It baffles me that anyone would go for the second option, unless a game is broken beyond fixing (which it clearly is not). Why wallow in your own victimhood if you can so easily do something about it yourself? Someone offers you either a glass of water or a glass of juice. And you expect us to choose the glass of water? I just can't seem to get your logic.

You took the words off my mouth. This is so spot-on!

Amen. And as of now, the most optimal strategy is to go for maxed out Arcana or Alchemy. I guess I won't think about other builds for now until they nerf this. Such is the crux of having a min-max mentality.

i don't see any 1.1 potd ranged dps sorry.. most of them are tank/melee/solo potd CHECK MY BUILD! It's ranged DPS :D

There are no impossible fights in the game if you know what to build. Even without using arcana scrolls or alchemy potions, you should be able to coast through the game just fine. What this post is about is how op drugs/scrolls are ruining the desire to make builds. Because in the end, a simple maxed out arcana/alchemy build will beat ANY build that you will ever think of and that's kind of disheartening. To people who are saying why not just stop using Arcana scrolls or Alchemy Potions. It's like why settle for marrying an average girl when you know you have the option to marry the most beautiful girl in the world?

so it actually only adds 10s max? i didnt know that. wow

Search for "the bomb" build in this subforum. Carnage + lord darrys voulge is amazing. And no i tested it, avenging storm doesnt proc off carnage Edit: Here's the link, https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/102639-single-class-build-the-ultimate-suicide-bomb/

THIS! Knowing that a simple maxed out arcana/alchemy build will beat ANY build that you will ever think of. It's kind of disheartening. Why settle for marrying an average girl when you know you have the option to marry the most beautiful girl in the world? I don't get the people who say just don't use Arcana scrolls / Alchemy potions.

HOLY WOW! This is so clever! I mean many have tried Deltro's trick before but the execution of this. My god! Props to you for making such a fun build

yeah any level 10 build can take the boss with maxed out alchemy or arcana. they are basically godmode. To other people, it's fair game but to me i consider them cheese. That doesn't mean it isn't fun. Heck, even the solo potd build I posted uses maxed out arcana to take advantage of avenging storm. You don't even need a party for the encounters you've posted. They are just all one meteor show/great maelstrom away from dying + withdraw to keep you alive. Or since you are running an alchemy build, Handmortar + stone joint (it's the most op alchemy potion) then use invisibility potion and wham wait for them to die. I do know of a build who can solo the last boss + all the encounters you've listed without any cheese though and that's with level scaling mod from Nexus. So far no one has posted anything like it so that's good! Thinking of posting but I'm afraid it might get too popular and you know how Obsidian likes to nerf popular op stuff. The poison only applies once, so handmortar and stonejoint doesn't work in AoE, only on primary target. oh really? damn

yeah any level 10 build can take the boss with maxed out alchemy or arcana. they are basically godmode. To other people, it's fair game but to me i consider them cheese. That doesn't mean it isn't fun. Heck, even the solo potd build I posted uses maxed out arcana to take advantage of avenging storm. You don't even need a party for the encounters you've posted. They are just all one meteor show/great maelstrom away from dying + withdraw to keep you alive. Or since you are running an alchemy build, Handmortar + stone joint (it's the most op alchemy potion) then use invisibility potion and wham wait for them to die. I do know of a build who can solo the last boss + all the encounters you've listed without any cheese though and that's with level scaling mod from Nexus. So far no one has posted anything like it so that's good! Thinking of posting but I'm afraid it might get too popular and you know how Obsidian likes to nerf popular op stuff. That not true :D I can solo most of them with Cipher/Ranger without Arcana/Achemy/Cheesing I doubt you could. Ranger pets are too squishy. Cipher is not tanky enough either. I'd love for you to show me a vid and prove me wrong though.

Why even play a single player game if its just gonna be an unbalanced mess. Mario wouldn't be as popular today if it gave you an item that allowed you to not die from falling. In fact, no one would play it.

Do have mixed feelings. > I do find scrolls/arcana a sleeper OP. Being able to cast Shining Beacons or Cleansing Flames at effectively power level 22... is really strong. At the same time, using it would be usually an overkill since boss fights are not hard enough, so why invest the points, crafting materials, money and time? Not to mention that there are quite many enemies immune to fire. It looks to me that the main use of scrolls/arcana is if you want to get some specific unique item through combat as early as possible. > Do have a mixed feeling about alchemy. The main appeal was the speed bonuses. But with the heavy nerf of Potion of Deftness and Potion of Relentless Striking, alchemy has transformed from must-have on all dps characters to "well, I can live without it". The potions that provide +stats are still great though, if you have a dotter that is not a Helwalker. Also poisons. Some of them look weak, others tick like a truck. So it feels either meh, or cheesy. > Food. Food that gives immunity to afflictions makes taking all those counter-affliction chants and invocations kinda questionable. Not to mention priest inspirations; which are still to slow to cast for their effect. > Traps. It takes time to put a trap and lure the enemies into it. But at the moment it's faster just to plainly jump and kill them. I think food and traps are in a balance state. It's more about the scrolls and potions you can get. For scrolls, great maelstrom and meteor shower can literally 1 shot any mob while you use scroll of withdraw so you don't get damaged For potions, stone join and storm toxin are just goddamn stupid. The first one hits like a truck (150-200 per tick) while the second one gets the target paralyzed 100% of the time + ticking damage of 50-100. Insubstantial turns the enemys crits to hits and hits to misses by 47%, deadeye gives you 38% chance of interrupt plus a 27 accruacy, spirit shield gives you 7 armor + concentration bonus, perfect aim makes your misses to hits and your hits to crits by 47%, potion of impediment gives your attacks 67% chance to interrupt, acenscion gives you 5 power levels until combat ends. So many op things with alchemy. I'm sure there are many more.

yeah but the thing is. a level 10 chracter with maxed out arcana/alchemy will have an easier time than a well-built character that does not use consumables. it just kind of puts you off into tinkering with builds to get the most optimal result.

That doesn't help XD and I'm pretty sure it's a bug. It's super fun though with plague of insects. damn

What's actually the point of tinkering with builds when any, I mean ANY build can ABSOLUTELY trash the game with just maxed out arcana or maxed out alchemy. It's just plain silly. Obsidian needs to really sort this out. What do you guys think?

yeah any level 10 build can take the boss with maxed out alchemy or arcana. they are basically godmode. To other people, it's fair game but to me i consider them cheese. That doesn't mean it isn't fun. Heck, even the solo potd build I posted uses maxed out arcana to take advantage of avenging storm. You don't even need a party for the encounters you've posted. They are just all one meteor show/great maelstrom away from dying + withdraw to keep you alive. Or since you are running an alchemy build, Handmortar + stone joint (it's the most op alchemy potion) then use invisibility potion and wham wait for them to die. I do know of a build who can solo the last boss + all the encounters you've listed without any cheese though and that's with level scaling mod from Nexus. So far no one has posted anything like it so that's good! Thinking of posting but I'm afraid it might get too popular and you know how Obsidian likes to nerf popular op stuff.

No, it doesn't. You guys have no real world evidence for your arguments. In fact, the real world evidence points in the opposite direction. But yall continue to assert that somehow it must be true. You keep banding about that phrase, but all you're doing yourself is either referencing the fact that certain games were praised in their day / sold well (which by itself proves nothing about, say, the quality of per rest systems as such); or, as in this post, you're just using your own particular interpretations of games and game design to support your point of view. Which would be fine in itself, if you weren't pretending that it is some kind of objective fact, and being an enormous git about it to boot. But just to engage with your fondness of objectivity and evidence for a second, regarding these *meaningful* encounters. What definition of 'meaningful' are you using here? If we're talking evidence here, you probably ought to be more specific. And is this an industry standard for 'meaningful encounter' you're referencing? If so, could you cite, let's say, three independent sources? If not, why is this particular definition of 'meaningful encounter' relevant? What are its merits relative to other plausible definitions of 'meaningful encounters', and do you have objective and verifiable sources to support those? Is there empirical data on the degree of development effort required to implement such 'meaningful encounters' as a function of other components of the design, such as the relative preponderance of per-rest versus per-encounter abilities and items? You know, when we're talking about 'real world evidence'. Just some questions that spring to mind. And by the way, I have no particular need to cite extensive real world evidence. Myself, I am merely arguing for a particular view on the quality of games (in this particular genre, and more generally), and what I would see as fruitful and less fruitful in obtaining such quality (and in which I see no role for a per-rest system in anything like its existing forms). It is a personal point of view on topics being discussed in this thread, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in a discussion forum. Unless you're actually prepared to present the kind of evidence you're yammering about, perhaps you should drop the pretense that you are anything more than that (though admittedly discussion actually requires engaging other people's arguments and point of view, something you have so far rather emphatically failed to do; probably work a bit on that as well, would be my suggestion). I'm afraid we got baited in by a troll. It seems that cokane is a troll as mentioned by Orpheus on here.

yeah, this build is not going to last in potd if playing solo lol. Just the video demonstration alone showed me it would need serious reworking. You just simply aren't tanky enough to do it and you will run out of resources against single target high hp targets. to test this out, go in a secluded are and summon the guardian of ukaizo so you can see how your build fares against it. open up the console with tilde button ` then type in iroll20s. Then for the console command, its SpawnPrefabAtMouse cre_ukaizo_guardian If you are not level 20 yet, you can use this command AddExperienceToLevel 20 If you need items for your build, you go giveitem then tab to fill in the blanks. alternatively you can just go to the wiki page and get the item id. copy paste that NOTICE: have a duplicate save and do this test in one of those, that way it doesn't screw with your achievements.

Thank you

Hello, I forgot to add the description for my build. "A harbinger of storm, mowing enemies with her lightning machinegun"

.... Resting in POE1 is not strategic. It's just tedious. Nothing is stopping the player from just going back to the inn and back to the battles again. Many people did that in POE 1 and they found it tedious hence why Obsidian changed it what we now have for POE2. Also since Obsidian knows that we'll always be at max hp and max spell allowance, they can tune the game for that. Whereas in POE1, the resting system screws up the balance. There are plenty of combat which are very easy if you go back to an inn but are hard if you keep continuing with low resources. That's not strategic as well. It's just tedious work and a waste of player's time. Having an option is a good thing. So for POE2, you can limit yourself and play it like POE1. Problem Solved. "And Since Obsidian knows that we'll always be at max hp and max spell allowance, they can tune the game for that." Again, just assertion. Because the evidence suggests it's been much harder to balance difficulty. It's basic maths. The less variables involved, the easier to balance things. ie. if Obsidian knows that the player is going to be at full hp and has max resources for that encounter, then they will have the knowledge to balance the game based on that information whereas let's say if they didn't know, it would be much harder to balance the game because there is no starting point to rely on. Again, the real world evidence belies your claim. Information is only useful if you make good use of it. You can have the best planning + knowledge in the world but if your implementation and execution sucked, then the end product is likely to suck. ie. pillars 2 balance. the devs have said they knew the game was too easy right at the start but they wanted to focus and prioritize on bugs/issues/story. information is there but useless because they didn't act on it.

.... Resting in POE1 is not strategic. It's just tedious. Nothing is stopping the player from just going back to the inn and back to the battles again. Many people did that in POE 1 and they found it tedious hence why Obsidian changed it what we now have for POE2. Also since Obsidian knows that we'll always be at max hp and max spell allowance, they can tune the game for that. Whereas in POE1, the resting system screws up the balance. There are plenty of combat which are very easy if you go back to an inn but are hard if you keep continuing with low resources. That's not strategic as well. It's just tedious work and a waste of player's time. Having an option is a good thing. So for POE2, you can limit yourself and play it like POE1. Problem Solved. "And Since Obsidian knows that we'll always be at max hp and max spell allowance, they can tune the game for that." Again, just assertion. Because the evidence suggests it's been much harder to balance difficulty. It's basic maths. The less variables involved, the easier to balance things. ie. if Obsidian knows that the player is going to be at full hp and has max resources for that encounter, then they will have the knowledge to balance the game based on that information whereas let's say if they didn't know, it would be much harder to balance the game because there is no starting point to rely on.

I found nemnok but I can't see to spawn him with cre_imp_nemnok