Daskard

Well put, your argument makes sense to me. It's just that personally I don't miss my casters at any time - they can barely use their AoEs, because the enemies stick to my fighters, which increases the risk of friendly fire tremendously. I prefer a fighter with 3 pull skills that get through for crowd control to a wizard who loses every second or third skill to an interrupt. And it's the good skills that take time. I prefer a Beguiler, who can gain new cast ressources at any time, for crowd control over an Illusionist, who (partly) has friendly-fire crowd control with a set amount of uses. I prefer an autoattack monk for raw dps over a clunky glas cannon wizard with a set amount of friendly-fire AoE spells. (Don't tell me to just use missiles or wait ages for chain lightning) On another playthrough I will choose Cyphers over wizards, again. If you risk losing your skill uses, they should not be limited, otherwise the class is just too dependant on the enemy type, compared to the other clases. My Beguiler turns most enemies into unmotivated one-hits, while my Illusionist was just "Oh, half my skills effect my teammates, oh the other half got interrupted - autoattack it is. That was my personal experience and while I agree, that you can make wizards work well, as far as I have experienced it takes just more effort than with Cyphers. So why bother?

We all know, that the "The Defiant" can only pack 2 guns on each side - port and starboard. The model, however, has 4 guns on each side.

The loss of spells combined with their set number of uses per encounter were the main reason I stopped my illusionist after ~3h. Why would I choose a class, that doesn't deal damage and on top of that has such a limited amount of actions per encounter available? I chose a Cipher-Beguiler instead. Best decision ever. A hex has been interrupted? Not a problem, 2 shots with the bow and I have got my resources back. But! To those who defend the loss of an interrupted spell with "you lose the ressources for a fighter's skill, too": Fighter skills are instant (at least most of them?!) while many spells take a few seconds. Let's play a game: You try to interrupt my instant fighter attack and I try to interrupt your 3 second animation.

I would do both in a way. My main goal is a better introduction of the mechanic to the user. I understand the devs' predicament: How do you return deminishing results for a linear value? And they found a good solution. Now we just need their idea to be more obvious to the new user. So I'd improve not only the descriptions at the first occasion the user gets in contact with these mechanics (character creation), but also the description, where they see their chosen attribute values take effect right from the start. They should not only improve the descriptions in the character creation (for dexterity as well as intellect), but improve the skill description in the way you described it, as well (see screenshot as reference, bold = changes): Targeting: Foe Target + 3.4m Radius Area of effect: 37m² Tooltip at "37m²": "20m² Base, +70% intellect, +15% Overseeing (...)" Now the mechanics would be obvious and people, even if they didn't get it at the start, will at least understand it quite early.

i mean, i'm not going to really defend the tooltips (tooltip summaries for action speed/recovery time are the worst), but the game explicitly calls out intellect/overseeing/etc as +x% area of effect, not radius. (historical lesson is that poe1 used to actually boost radius in early versions and that got changed out to a similar area-based system after everyone realized how silly a decision that was; the wording also changed) Yes, intellect influences the area of effect. And as you can see in the screenshot, the parameter "area of effect" at an AoE spell is a linear value given in Meters and called a radius. So if I, as a developer, give the description, that intellect adds a certain percentage to the area of effect and state that percentage at that parameter "area of effect" which is stated as a radius, that percentage should influence that radius. That was one of the main reasons I pushed that stat. Unnecessarily confusing, I have to say. For action speed at least there is a solid reason why you have two words - action speed vs recovery time: Action speed reduces not only recovery/reload time, but also attack time. So there you have a different word for a different factor. Some equipment only reduces recovery time and it's stated as exactly that. For the AoE issue on the other hand we have a percentage stated as a influence at a radius, which doesn't influence that radius in the way presented. Solution: Make the description of intellect more destinctive for new players (such as my newbie self). Recalculate the AoE-percentage so that for each spell at the radius value the actual percentage, that influences it, is shown. This way you can keep the static percentage of the intellect in the character creation, while you can state a dynamic percentage for each AoE skill depending on its base radius.

Apparently the game calculates the AoE of skills wrong. In the following screenshot from my Cypher you can see the issue: 2.5 m * 0.85 = 2.125 m 2.5 m + 2.1m = 4.6 m, not 3.4m Am I missing something?

Alright then, since I've been travelling for quite a few days since that, she will be dead by now ... considering the whole fort has been de-pirated by a certain watcher and his party. On my next playthrough I will have to listen to the horns more carefully.

Roger that. For the gold reloading from much earlier is not worth the hassle. Thank you. The problem of the quest being misleading remains. She explicitly says, she might get caught if you free her while all the guards are still out and about. You cause the guards to not be as lively anymore and she is angry. Well, M'lady, make up your mind.

I have talked to Sceydwin and wanted to free her once it's safe. Then I killed Benweth and seemingly you should be able to free Sceydwin, after you have cleared the area, but she just says "Sod you!" Am I missing out on something interesting if I can't free her? I was going to rid the fortress of all pirates anyway. I know she will be a blacksmith, but is she useful in any way?