lMarcusl

Sorry for the necro but just a heads-up, the bug is still present. Started my current playthrough just a few weeks ago (post patch), got the books for the quest today, Tayn does start a dialogue about not trusting Llengrath but my only real outcome is to say I'll have to look for more books (even though I have them all). Speaking to him again shows the standard dialogue options, no mention of the books. I can refuse to give Llengrath the books on my second conversation with her, but Tayn still provides no new options.

Hm, I get why they'd apply this to Firebrand and Minor Blights as these are abilities and not benefitting from PL would not make much sense, and since the whole of the damage consists of that given element and keyword and damage immunity usually go hand in hand, there really wouldn't be an issue there either, anyway. But the rest...I mean, having arrows imbued with some extra Freeze or Shock on top as a lash should not affect the accuracy of the whole attack, and PL, as I understand the concept, shouldn't affect it at all either way. They could just revert the keywording change on these and not much of worth would be lost. Though I guess Arcane Archers wouldn't be happy...but they're Rangers, Rangers are not happy either way XD

Really? Well, that's a load off my chest. Has anyone figured out which those are, specifically? What makes Frostseeker different from, say Magran's Favor or other lash items that don't suffer from this?

Like I said, it's not just about Frostseeker and the associated Frost Shades. It apparently affects all damage lashes, which is a good number of items and an entire Druid subclass (and one Chant). I don't think I need to list all the enemies that have some type of keyword immunity (take the whole damn poison naga class, which constitutes a good portion of SSS content). And it is clearly a bug. X type keyword abilities not applying their status effects onto X keyword immunes is perfectly fine and works as it should, that is the whole reason for the X keyword immunity being in the game, as you say. Y damage-type keyword abilities not applying their Y-type damage, same thing, perfectly fine. But having a Y damage type invalidated because of an X keyword immunity is completely counter to the game's armor system and is obviously the result of the game's keywording mechanics applying where they shouldn't. Damage immunity should apply only to damage of that type (which already works as it should as evidenced by Neriscyrlas and other immunes taking proper damage from other damage types involved in the attack), keyword immunity should apply to non-damaging keyword effects of that type. But, clearly, here we have a keyword immunity applying to all damage, regardless of type, from an attack with that keyword. It is not working as intended, hence, a bug. What they need to do is make keyword immunity not affect damage but only status effects, since any status effects that deal damage (DoTs) will already be covered by damage immunity. Granted, that may not be an easy fix, depending on how it's coded that may require a massive overhaul of the keywording system. But there's no arguing whether this is bugged or not, it clearly is.

Just curious: is this something prevent you from using different weapons? Or you have just lonely Frostcaller in your inventary? Well, there is the small matter of not having infinite Adra Ban to upgrade additional items should the core of the character become unusable for no good reason (seriously, if you have a Pierce/Slash/Freeze damaging weapon, you shouldn't run into a problem of not being able to generate Focus. I don't care about the damage, but my resource generation turning off ain't cool with me). Secondly, there is the limit of item slots. Yeah obviously, if you KNOW beforehand that your three-damage type weapon can't do damage (wat?), you'll settle for something else, even if it isn't legendary. But when you find out in the middle of a pretty tough fight that your primary weapon doesn't work and your only alternative is a defensive melee setup in your other weapon set on a squishy Ascendant, you might not reach for that option too readily. Thirdly and most crucially...how is what you're asking in any way relevant? This is a bug report, not a whine post. The point isn't whether I can or cannot bypass a bug, the point is that there IS a bug to begin with that needs fixing. And it's not an issue that's exclusive to Frostseeker, it affects all (EDIT: well apparently not all) lashing items, hell it probably affects the whole set of Shifter Wildstrikes. Imagine building a Shifter, picking up all the Wildstrike lashes for extra damage,then finding out having one of these lashes turns ALL of your other damage off against certain enemies. Cause that's what I was planning to use for one of my future parties. My next party was going to have a Fire-focused SC Paladin, with fire-lashing weapons and fire-boosting gear and powerful FoD. Now I'm reconsidering that one too cause my character will not just be weaker in terms of damage agianst fire immune enemis, No, it will just stop working completely because the Fire-immune enemy will take no damage from my Slash-damage axe because of the Fire-lash it has on it. It's about a lot more than Frostseeker.

Huh. Well, that certainly explains the inconsistency. Boy is that a mess. So on one hand they have to have the frost keyword on items and attacks in order for them to properly benefit from +accuracy, +pen bonuses etc., on the other slapping an immunity to the keyword onto a monster reduces an item from 3 damage-type armor cleaver into a 0-damage type waste of an item slot. The keyword immunity is a neat idea but doesn't seem worth the tradeoff.

I don't get why it's not consistent though. I'm damaging Neriscyrlas with Frostseeker just fine with the pierce portion, where all "logic" would dictate that it would be broken there as well. Similarly, some of the spirits in the Drowned Kingdom portion of the Shattered Realm are immune to Freeze, but the Slash portion of the damage (Slash being their lowest armor rating of the three) goes through their armor without issue as it should. So it doesn't seem to be an issue of the "damage bundling" but rather the target's armor system.

Hi, I'm currently going through the Beast of Winter DLC and I noticed that, when using Frostseeker against Frost Shades, my Cipher is doing no damage and generating no Focus. Now, Forst Shades are listed as having immunity to Freeze, while Frosteeker only does Freeze as a lash. There is no Pierce or Slash immunity listed, yet my character's hits (hits as confirmed by the UI) do no damage because "Frost Shade is immune", with the Pierce icon shown afterwards. For some reason, the game bundles the lash that's supposed to result from the bow damage with the bow damage, and the immunity to Freeze applies to both the Slash and the Pierce portion of the attack. Frost Shades do not have this behaviour with non-lashing damage, as my Fighter with Blade of the Endless Paths deals Pierce damage to the Shades as normal. It's just the Freeze and it's not just a UI error, as evidenced by 0 Focus generation. I suspect this issue will occur with other weapons and other types of lash immunities, which breaks lash weapons in some encounters. Update: The problem does not appear to be universal. When fighting against the Dracolich in the same DLC, who is also immune to Cold, the Pierce portion of Frostseeker's damage goes through.

Yeah, resolved it with Animancer's Blade, since I use it on my second weapon set anyway in case my main set can't pen. Still, you essentially have to switch your build to dual-wielding if you want to ever upgrade the weapon, which is far from ideal. Soft Winds of Death would have given me the completion in a single fight (isn't it sad how a tier 1 chant does a better job at doing AoE damage than tier 4 Dragon Thrashed, Dragon Wailed? But I digress).

Just adding to this. On my Howler (Corpse-Eater + Skald), Soft Winds of Death, which deal Raw damage, do not contribute to Soulbound progress either. After running the Spider seeker trial, slaughtering a ton of tiny spiders with both Carnage and Chant, my weapon is still at 0/1000.

Damn, I nearly forgot about that. There were so many occasions where I was faced with a stat check, half the characters would pass it and half would not...and nothing. I get past the scripted event, not even an injury to my name... So what you're saying is, half of my party failed to climb the rope across the chasm due to their lacking athletics...but we all made it to the other side? My athletic characters managed to swim through the flooded tunnel to the other end while the rest didn't make it...but we're all here in the cave. I...o-ok. I'm with ya on that.

That's...exactly what I said. In either system (mine with forced roster rotation and stronghold turns or yours with time requirements), you'd have to have a separate system for the Watcher, cause you cannot afford to cart your main character around with 3 injuries and wait for 9 days before you can finally enter a fight without risking your entire campaign any more than you can realistically put your main character on the bench for 3 stronghold turns and go complete quests with some other main character.

It doesn't have to be an ancient system if they give it meaning and impact like if they adopted the XCOM mechanic of injuries only healing when the character is out of action/out of the party for a mission or two. As it stands though, it might as well not be there. However, I feel there is something to be said for the brutal honesty of the system as it is now. As similarly meaningless as the system was before, in PoE1 they made it such a hassle to go back for camping supplies or inn rest (the load times were awful) that it actually made the player try to do it as little as possible, though in reality they could do it as much as they wanted. Now that the "veil" has been pulled back, and we just rest like it's the snoring olympics, the importance of individual encounters is laid pretty damn bare. Where originally the player had the illusion of being on a long, drawn out campaign where they were saving up resources over a longer series of encounters, in PoE2 the ease of resting smacks you right in the face with how much the emphasis is on one encounter at a time. The interim periods don't matter. Win the fight or lose it, nothing in between is of any consequence. Which, IMO, is the reason why the combat feels so disappointing. It's one thing if combat is easy and you're deceiving yourself into being in it for the long haul. It's another when the game tells you straight to your face that resting is unlimited and injuries don't matter and then throws underpowered trash packs at you until you weep for any semblance of difficulty. With the way the balance currently is, they kinda shot themselves in the foot by making the emphasis on individual encounters instead of whole dungeons so obvious.

See, here's the thing: that's exactly the experience that I'm having. I think part of the problem is that people are having *very* different experiences on different difficulty levels, and many of the "solutions" that people are offering are very general game changes that would effect *every* difficulty level. Well, it might also be the consequence of the game's more open world. Areas no longer follow up on one another in a chessboard-like fashion, so you can end up in vastly different areas at completely different times than other players. Estimating and balancing for such massive disparities is essentially only possible if you just flip on the Scale All switch (with down option active as well) so that you don't end up in ****'s creek without a paddle. I ended up on the side of the spectrum where I smeared my facial area against the wall for a few hours and then completed a massive series of non-combat quests. From that point on, everything was way too easy. Except for the final Eothas fight. That didn't go too well for me.

I think there is a middle ground to be found between per rest's "I never use any of my per rest abilities unless I have to or until I have Masteries" and per encounter's "I got a full per encounter arsenal ****ed and ready, let's go blow up planets". Every player is different and everyone tackles each system in their own way, but I'm one of the guys who, even with decent amount of experience in PoE1 still barely ever uses per rest abilities because "what if". What if a fight gives me more trouble than expected and I don't have a full arsenal ready to go? Is it going to happen? Likely not, I know the given area decently well and I'm at the right level for it. But I still can't make myself use that stuff. Cause what if... On the other hand, having a 5 spell queue already set up for all characters on the first unpause every encounter is about as engaging as autoattack fights. Well, it's a bit more flashy but yeah, gets repetitive after a while and it takes acquiring a new level for things to change. Funnily enough, I don't feel the same way in ARPGs even though most of the game my character has access to the exact same arsenal that they can liberally use. But the difference is, things are very dynamic in ARPGs, they change, you have to react to them, enemies are varied in abilities, resistances, quantities...so even if you are doing mostly the same stuff, putting the stuff in different contexts makes all the difference. If you throw a spanner in the works, make the player change up the routine, per encounter can be much better than per rest because your characters and their abilities aren't a hindrance (or time sink for repeated camping), they're an asset, as they should be. But that requires a much deeper, varied encounter design, more pronounced strengths and weaknesses and tactics (charging your backline, teleporting, cc, flat out immunities or extreme resistances, etc.). What we got, though, is pretty much what we had in PoE1. That would have been fine for PoE1's systems. It's not fine for per encounter. I guess what I'm saying, to get back on topic, is that forced camping by ability restriction or health limitations was, in its consequences, actually significantly worse than the current injury system, as it was similarly meaningless for the survival of the characters in reality. It doesn't matter if you consume plentiful food to heal or consume cheap and plentiful camping supplies to heal and recover abilities, you have unlimited access to both camping resources, per rest just makes people be more careful because it wastes time to restock, not because the system itself is good, the incentive for resting as little as possible is twisted. But per rest had the added effect of causing certain types of players to engage with the combat system way less than was actually necessary in reality. It required the player to estimate just how little they should indulge in their abilities, which requires either guesswork or prior experience. Per encounter does away with that, and could, in theory, still put just as much emphasis on the player using their abilities in a judicious manner, if only combat encounters were more varied (to force you to use different abilities than your routine), lengthy (to create situations where you run out and start wishing you saved a particular spell tier for later) and challenging (so that which decisions you do and do not make in a given encounter actually even matters). It would matter, then, that my Templar has already used two of his level x Priest spells and can no longer, say, Resurrect or suspend hostile effects, etc. But the circumstances in which that would matter are never there in the first place, because combat is too easy. As is usually the case, the abilities, characteristics, specific behaviours and resistances of enemies only matter when they're threatening. When everything is easy, they might as well be interchangeable. At that point, which meaningless resting system of the two is being used to replenish your resources is an afterthought, as neither can make up for lacking encounter design. Both per rest and per encounter require their own approach to combat, and what we got was a per encounter game but with per rest encounters.

The reason I'd tie it to a separate turn system is the introduction of the Wait mechanic. Instead of the rest button, you'd just be pressing the Wait button, except now you don't even need to consume food. The intent of tying it to a turn system that only ticks over during quest progress, like Stronghold Turns used to do, is so that when you're forced to change your party composition due to injuries, you actually have to USE that composition for something, achieve something with them, instead of waiting an arbitrary amount of time so that you can go back to the comp you were using the whole time. The only hole in that plot that I can see is that the Watcher would have to be excluded from that system and have a separate one all of their own, since, you know, you can't actually put the Watcher on the bench and take on someone else as the leader.

I agree with the OP that it's a relic from the olden days. The game should decide. It should have done so in PoE1, but as someone who really only got into cRPGs with that game (didn't play Planescape or Baldur's Gate), I'm kinda glad they left it in just so I have some understanding of how meaningless the system is (granted, it took 3 playthroughs and the perspective of having played PoE2). Injuries have no consequence. They are no limitation upon anything you do. You press a button, feed your guys some random stale piece of bread you got lying around and BAM, that broken knee, concussion and acid burn is history. The system doesn't even have the common decency to waste my time with 5 minute load screens (jk). You push a button and everything is solved, using the exceedingly rare resource of food...that you have in piles of like 500 on your ship, because the stuff you use to clear the critical result of failure in combat, for some reason, comes from the same resource pool that you are expected to consume by the hundreds. O-ok. There are two ways to go and currently the game does neither. Either the system should be scrapped. Take per rest abilies and empower with it for all I care. I've used empower maybe twice in the whole Veteran campaign and more out of curiosity rather than need. Not having that resource refill would mean taking more care when and where you use your resources in tougher fights, and I don't think having an ability be 10 power levels higher is a healthy solution to any problem. Other than that, most per rest abilities tend to be irrelevant considering the amount of abilities you have access to on per encounter basis. I'm pretty sure I haven't used a single Watcher-only ability in my PoE2 playthrough and they were an afterthought in PoE1 as well for me. Out of all the systems the game offers you to play with, even traps tend to get more use in my playthroughs than Watcher abilities. And that's saying something. Alternatively, make the resting system matter. Don't make it a one click cure all. Make characters rest, by all means. But make it have impact. Force the character to sit out the next couple of quests if they have an injury (following the old "stronghold turn" system from PoE1 for instance, so you can't bypass it by waiting). Make the player shuffle up a party composition, try new stuff, new gear, new abilities, adapt to changing circumstances. Getting someone injured would suddenly be a thing you care about instead of a meaningless, minor resource dump. It would draw on another resource the game never uses, that being your character roster (how often do you really reach into your character roster unless you're completing a companion quest? my parties stay the same from start to finish outside of that). And it would be a different thing to different people. Some would try to avoid injuries at all costs, making combat more tense, while others might actually welcome the incentive to try a new party composition, and wouldn't mind injuries at all. And for those who fall in neither camp, nothing stops you from creating a custom back-up character just in case your Mechanics guy ends up with an ouchie on his face. I'd much prefer the game commits rather than trivialise the already trivial system even further.

While I agree that the areas I gave as an example are ones where you are indeed intended to go back and forth, the question I'd pose is and the conclusion I've come to (and others such as Multihog also mentioned) when looking back at PoE2 is...why do you have to? You weren't always running back to turn in a quest or deciding to return later because of high difficulty in Endless Paths or White March areas. Sometimes you were just out of stuff. Other times, you would NOT backtrack or run out of camping supplies, but that was specifically because, playing on PotD, you had prior experience with the game, knew how long each dungeon was, and usually resupplied on camping stuffs before you went in. And why? Just so you don't waste the time to go back for that stuff later. The motivation? Save bunch of time on loading screens...and like 300 cp for the supplies if you went back to pick up ones you left behind instead of buying new ones. That is an illusion of a motivation, just like injuries are in PoE2. They don't really matter, you can clear them out easily. You can camp 5 times in one dungeon floor in PoE1 too, if you really wanted to. It'd be annoying for time reasons but not much else. I'm coming to the conclusion that those out-of-combat attrition systems might as well not be there to pay lip service to some table-top mechanics. No real need to rebalance them if you're not going to really commit to a system that matters, like in XCOM. Get rid of them for all I care. But provide the same stimulus and the same level of difficulty we had in PoE1 (same level of difficulty relative to the per encounter system we now have in place, not the old system of PoE1). Because looking back at it now, PoE1's attrition system was, though less blatantly, just as broken and meaningless as PoE2's is if you were willing to tolerate the loading screens. But I didn't care because the combat was so goddamn satisfying on higher difficulties I would tolerate all the dialogue I'm going to skip through just to get to it. I'm not willing to do that for PoE2, because in terms of enjoyment of combat, there is little there. So yeah, if your point is that PoE1's attrition system wasn't any better, I agree. It's just that the game was much less open about it, since the resolution to your problems (injuries) wasn't a single button click away, you had to sit through some load screens too.

Ok, you want a number? I finished PoE1 three times. Once on Normal, then on Veteran with a custom party, then on PotD with a custom party. On PotD, I wrote down in my Notes every location of camping supplies I found and couldn't pick up, and returned to pick them up about 50 % of the game (only really stopped for White March II and the second part of the main campaign). Due to min/maxing, my damage dealers were cold-blooded killers, but squishy, which I addressed by making one of them semi-focused on CC (Cipher) and by taking on an off-tank. In harder fights (and I don't just mean bounties or bosses, a good deal of Endless Paths and White March I and II fell into this category) or fights that did not exactly go my way, it wasn't rare to force an immediate rest after to clear out key injuries on my DPS or to replenish health or key abilities. By the end of the game, I mopped up all but one camping supply stack that I found in the first half of the game and I regularly went to inns or stronghold for key resting bonuses to make my DPS more efficient or pass important stat checks. I'd backtrack every time I ran out of camping supplies, which happened every few hours on PotD. Yes, it is a thing. That happens. To humans.

I don't think the issue is as complex as you think. Firstly, a great deal of it can simply be resolved by difficulty levels, after all, that's what they're there for. If you're being challenged at normal, you stick to normal. If you're feeling a bit bored on normal, just turn the scaling on (that should be an option you can change mid-campaign!!!). There are knobs to be turned, you can customise your experience. Obsidian rebalancing the difficulty does not have to mean turning all difficulties balls hard, it doesn't have to be a flat increase of X or Y across the board. They can touch individual fights as they see fit. Most PoE1 content was relatively middling in terms of difficulty, but there were those out-of-the-way, optional fights where you can truly test your mettle, if you wanted to. They can do the same with PoE2 and keep the main story content relatively straightforward while still providing us masochists something to squeal about. Secondly, being forced to play "the right way" only truly becomes a thing if there are obstacles put in front of you that you cannot overcome in alternative ways. For instance, if you are facing a group of enemies with Dominate abilities, yes, it is best you have someone in your party to break these, like a Paladin with Aegis of Loyalty and resistance to Intelligence Afflictions. But you can just as easily apply an Intelligence Inspiration to protect yourself before Dominate even takes effect on key characters (Eldritch Aim on Wizard for example), or make it priority no. 1 to Paralyze/Petrify/Stun or simply Interrupt the caster before they can pull off their mean tricks, or focus them down with your damage dealers so that even though Dominate will be a pain, it will only happen once. Or you just blow through some high-end food to give yourself higher defense or resistance against such attacks. There are ways around this problem, and given the fact that your standard party will consists of at least 5 classes, often more due to multiclassing, chances are good that you will be able to pick up the tools you need to achieve at least one of the above scenarios. If there was an ability or a combat scenario where one skill and one skill alone is the path to take to overcome that, yes, then we'd have an issue. To give an example from a different genre, it is optimal, if your class has access to it, to take a temporary immunity skill in an ARPG. But unless the game is designed entirely around you having access to the immunity and consistently one-shots you unless you got quick fingers, you can afford to not take such an ability (which is why I often don't) and find different routes to solve your problems. If you have to stand in a bunch of ground DoT in a small boss room, you can solve the problem by high HP/resists, mobility skills, more dps with resistance reductions...and so on and so on. Good ARPGs give you those options. If the boss had an Enrage timer that would make it absolutely annihilate you if you lack sufficient DPS to kill it before the Enrage triggers, that's an issue you can't bypass, and suddenly doing suboptimal things doesn't just punish you, but bars you from playing, which is what ARPGs designed by idiots do. In this respect, I'd say the only worry would be that if they rebalance the difficulty, some class combinations might be so powerful that even the difficulty boost won't slow them down, and they'll want more. There are still the options for those, though, such as taking fewer people into your party etc. to address that. Those who want a challenge can pick a goofy composition and go nuts. There is so much to mess around with in terms of how hard you make the game on yourself that I wouldn't worry about being punished for taking a party of 5 melee Battlewizards.

To clear this one up...you don't have to rest spam to run out of Camping Supplies. On PotD, you can carry 2 Camping Supplies at a time. So yes, there were plenty of occasions where I'd be walking past 2 or 3 stacks of camping supplies, wondering why the hell I'd need them in the given area. Then I'd be in a more difficult area, like in Endless Paths a bit earlier than is healthy, and I'd camp twice on one level and need to backtrack a couple of levels to pick up what I left behind. And not due to ability spam, mind you, but because of health. Some classes get a better deal on health:endurance ratio than others, and if you dip your toes in min/maxing, your DPS class, with poor health:endurance ratio will have little in terms of HP and defense, relying on your tanks and cc to keep things in order. If stuff goes sideways, it's not rare for your DPS to get laid out twice in a fight, essentially depleting the majority of their health and inflicting some rather debilitating injuries that need clearing up for them to be effective as DPS. In addition to that, it only takes one unfortunate fight to force you to rest to get your squishies back up. Now say there was a stat check that you were making your way towards. Now you gotta haul butt back to the inn to reacquire to bonus to pass the stat check you were going for in the first place.

Actually I think you might be on to something there, and it would not be impossible to implement either would be my guess. Looking at the issue as a whole in both PoE1 and PoE2, let's be brutally honest. The health/injury system might as well not be there. They are far too easily bypassed in both games. PoE1 punishes you by time wasted (loading screens to reach the nearest inn/camp supply shop), PoE2 doesn't punish you at all save for losing some bonuses from food you can't craft any more of. The end goal of both systems is to make you play more thoughtfully and carefully but neither achieves that, and outright losing a character requires a serious degree of recklessness on the part of the player. If instead the game took on a similar approach as it does in say XCOM or in DF's ship combat and injuries can be cleared only by sending a given character to sit it out on the bench for a while (at least that's how I think it works in ship combat, didn't too deep into that), you'd not only have an actual reason to avoid injuries to maintain your beloved, optimal party composition, but you'd be forced, one way or another, the take on characters with maybe not the best gear (which makes you utilise a wider range of items, rather than having 18 legendary level uniques just sitting in the stash cause your 5 characters have better ones), change up your tactics, and try different things instead of settling on that one party comp for the rest of the game the moment you got all the characters you need. It would give meaning to what characters you have available in your roster. Maybe for once Pallegina would have to get off her ass and get her hands dirty when she'd otherwise be sitting it all out save for when her character quest comes up. Hell, every time I played PoE1 with custom-made characters, I'd create one extra "just in case I feel like changing things up". The guy would never leave the stronghold screen and would be relegated to running stronghold missions. If PoE2 had a similar system to the "stronghold turns" from PoE1 (it would affect ship injury times too), you'd basically have to play by the system and you'd be unable to bypass it by resting or waiting (resting would be relegated to giving your party bonuses through food). Since stronghold turns only tick when you complete quests (or solve encounters like the ones on the islands), the character would have to be out of your party and you'd be forced to DO stuff with their replacement.

Just finished the campaign yesterday on Veteran and the conclusion I've arrived at is that the difficulty itself, not necessarily the attrition system behind it, is the real issue. Looking at the way the system of PoE1 could be bypassed by just hauling your butt to the nearest inn/camping supply shop if you were willing to tolerate the load times, its attrition rarely took effect. Having finished a PotD run just before PoE2 came out, there were never really situations where I went into a fight with low health or limited abilities. The abilities just never got used until I got into a fight where I knew I'd have to pull all the stops. That only changed once I got masteries. Health only ever became a problem if I went in with middling health to begin with and over the course of a couple of resurrections, one of my characters got up and could only be healed to like 100 hp. But the reason PoE1 combat felt so satisfying to me was because there was a lot of it and it was extremely varied. There were entire zones where Charms and Dominations were your enemy no. 1, areas where all the characters with Pierce damage became useless (Blights) and you had to improvise with half your team remaining effective, areas where you were faced with meaty tanks protecting really damn powerful spellcasters (Ogre Druids, early encounters with High Level Scaled Forest Lurkers and Pwgra), bounty fights against massive, powerful mercenary companies (Brynlod, Magran's Faithful, the Gleaming Society) and plenty of "dragon taming", with numerous adds in the fight alongside the overgrown lizard. Knockouts were a real thing and by the end of my PotD playthrough, pretty much everyone except my tankiest characters were approaching 20-30 knockouts by the end of the game. Even if the out-of-combat resource management was more of a time-wasting hindrance rather than a real system with real in-game consequences, there were numerous fights where I'd have to redo several times to get it right. Looking back at my PoE2 stats on Veteran...the highest number of knockouts I got on a character is 7. 90% of those happened within the first few levels where health seems to just disapper after a few hits. There were about 3 situations where I had to reload due to combat difficulty, all of which were caused by me being about 3 levels below the content (Old City Ruins required multiple reloads to get out of there, then a random Xaurip + Drake encounter on an island and trying to murderkill Cap Aeldys on our first meeting just cause my character is a Templar and won't deal with criminals...I postponed that one till later). Granted, I have taken the peaceful option against the dragons, so it is likely I robbed myself of some tougher fights, but even the fights that were obviously meant to be hard (Giant Grub, Concelhaut, some of the hidden boss areas such as Ancient Lich, Fampyr cave, Fampyr Island etc.) were all done on the first try. If there was a Camping Supply system, I would have rested maybe 15 times for health and per rest abilities, and would have felt no more satisfied by my experience with the game's combat than I am now. If the injury system was more punishing and I had to manage my resources better, care more about how many injuries I'm accumulating from traps and knockouts because I could, say, only clear one injury per rest...all it would result in is me resting more often, and still being disappointed by the combat. It seems to me, no matter the systems and resources at the out-of-combat layer, the lacking combat difficulty and variety are the main crux of the issue. Maybe if I played with level scaling on, my opinion would be different. Hard to tell when I can't change scaling midway through the game if I find I'm bored by the combat after lvl 6 Edit: My guess on the core problem of the encounter design is that they took more or less the same approach they did when designing encounters for PoE1. However, since the player is no longer penalised for using all their abilities (which, let's be honest, we really shouldn't be, otherwise, what are the abilities for?), we can consistently blow all the buffs, debuffs and AoEs every single fight, making the encounters trivial. The difficulty has to be scaled way up to compensate for our newly acquired power, but it seems it took the opposite route. Top difficulty fights on the level of Magran's Faithful and Alpine Dragon aren't there at all, and fights on the level below are tuned for per rest ability usage, not per encounter.

Just finished the campaign for the first time, going into the final area solo (no faction allegiance) and having completed the quest for all my companions. My standing with Pallegina was at 0, completely neutral. At the end of the game, I received an ending slide for all characters except for Pallegina. She was not in my party for Ukaizo and she was still alive when I crossed the no-return area. Sadly can't upload the save due to file size limitation for the forums.

I kinda disagree with that. It makes sense for PoE 1 to have long dungeons because its resource system (Health, per rest skills, Camping Supplies) makes it so that gradual exhaustion is what kills you rather than individual fights (though Alpine Dragon and Magran's Faithful took care of that niche well enough). Death by a thousand cuts. Your spells start depleting, health gets low...one last stack of Camping Supplies. Ofc that only became a problem if you were, for some reason, unwilling to just go back for more supplies, rest up in an inn and go in again...so yeah, far from perfect. However, once you finished the game once or twice and the story ceased being a relevant motivator, I found the combat, character optimisation and party optimisation to be the real draw, and I was plenty satisfied with how much combat of widely varying difficulties I got from the game. PotD especially was quite satisfying. I do agree with the second part though. It feels like PoE 2 is a bunch of bite-sized combat encounters, like the ones you meet randomly out there on an island or when boarding a ship, but a lot of sustained, long combat back-to-back is a rare thing to see. I'm almost at the end of the game and I feel I got more fighting done in White March I and II than I have in this whole game. Could be, though, that I've done plenty of fighting and then some, but it didn't feel particularly memorable because most of it was way too easy outside of areas where I was underlevelled. As someone going into the game blind (as in, no Beta experience) and learning the new systems from scratch, Veteran should not leave me feeling this way.