toastification

Augmentations that aren't overwritten by redundancy all apply perfectly normally to empowered spells. I haven't seen a single case where that isn't true, but I didn't empirically test all of the skills.

Um. Wow. I haven't seen anything remotely similar in any of the characters.

AI-Katarina is pretty bad at getting stuck as well. She just stands there and fires off her rifle machinegun into empty air until she runs out of focus. Don't attempt to melee blow for blow on hardcore. Enemies hit too hard, and I don't think its actually possibly to mitigate that incoming damage to the point where you can outlast it. If your melee doesn't have a guaranteed disable component to interrupt enemy strikes in time, you will get skewered. In those situations you hit and run, or bait enemy swing, hit and run. Repulsion Ward is godlike. Spec it for damage. Spam it. You are now literally immune to non-heavy melee, and heavy melee enemies are slow. Also, combo it with the rifle curse upgraded for maximum slow. At the start of every fight, cast an empowered version of the curse on the enemy group (it has massive empowered AoE and its very easy and fast to charge it up because its only 20 focus per cast) - they are now slowed down to a crawl. Personally I think Katarina is a little overpowered compared to Lucas and Reinhart. Lucas puts himself at risk when attacking enemies. Reinhart has difficulty peeling off melee assassin swarms until late game. Katarina just outputs massive damage at long range, has easy crowd control, and more importantly, can stack 2 curses on enemies to reduce their damage into almost nothing. Rajani's spear toss that basically nearly one shot my Reinhart? Hit my Katarina for 80 damage. Its ridiculous how much she trivializes boss fights with those 2 spells.

DS2 is the only game in my memory that I quit half-way through simply because I got bored to tears. And I played tons and tons of Diablo/Titan Quest/etc. Something about this situation is suspicious.

You can only empower at full mastery bar. And, really, "if you try to use both stances a lot you will end up not mastering any of the abilities and gimp yourself," not true. You can easily max mastery on every skill. Just don't let your Focus bar fill out and sit there. I think it's a little grindier than it should be in terms of pacing (if you don't use the skill you want to master to the exclusion of others you will have to clear an area a few extra times before you learn your next skill). As for specializing in a stance or both.. it's really hard to "specialize" in a stance this game. You really more specialize in your favorite combo of spells, but they will invariably be from both stances if you want to be at highest efficiency. Lucas clears crowds in one stance and wrecks single targets in the other. Reinhart's spells need to be chained and stacked together to maximize the speed at which he melts something. Katarina I didn't finish the game with yet, but I see the same principle emerging. Anjali has situational nukes in both of her kits, but the spells from two different kits really work well together.

You should get a job at the U.N. as the universal arbitrator of quality.

There's a deed for having 60 lore entries.

Problem is, you only really get safe opportunities to use it on approach. In battle, you can't walk away from enemies far enough to be able to play out the animation - those assassin dudes always catch up to you and chain a thousand damage and then some while you cast it. I guess you could use it against heavy enemies like Knights, Giants, etc.; but then it becomes an inefficient attack in terms of time spent and cost. The only time I found I was able to cast it mid-battle against a low hp swarm of high damage enemies (where it pays off the most) is right after I get revived by my companion - enemies seem to ignore me for the precious 2 seconds needed to fire it. And really, Blade Dash one shot all the trash mobs for me anyway from any starting position once I had enough Doom. As for empowered abilities: 1. Yes. Getting hit for half your HP always guarantees a power orb. Don't remember the exact ratio, but I think can even score 2 power orbs without dying (that's a risky way to build them). But it's really safer to try to block if you actively want to build up power by getting hit. Also, remember, 100 Focus spent with abilities = 1 full power orb. So if you invested in focus generation and spam abilities, its fairly easy to spam empowered abilities on top of it. For example, Lucas with a fully upgraded Wrath buff (his master class defensive ability) can spend 1 power orb to gain 3 simply by spamming abilities into the air as he generates focus; you should never go into battle without being completely maxed on everything with him. Katarina and Reinhart are even more special cases - they can build up power orbs from critical strikes. Katarina generally will have a lot agility (between her second tier buff and +% agility talent she gets a freebie +40% agility; and her second tier curse makes it even easier to crit); while Reinhart's Entropic spells end up landing a massive number of crits simply because they hit so many targets. A single Empowered Geometry of Annihilation can fill up all 4 power orbs several times over. 2. Depends on the ability and augmentation. In most cases the answer is yes unless the empowerment has an effect that "overwrites" the regular effect. If you knock the targets down, what is use is an augmentation that stuns them at the same time agaisnt most enemies? I haven't bothered to test Earthrending Strike's augmentations because the Empowered version basically did both augmentations at the same time on its own; while I don't see how the knock down components can stack, the range increase might prove to be interesting. Adding another 10 meters to the radius on top of the Empowered version will probably make it hit the entire screen.

You will want to phrase your first question better, at best its possible that to figure out that you are asking something about Reinhart's Trap spell. In the merchant interface, there is visible icon (in form of the appropriate face) which tells you which character can equip that particular item. If it's blanked out, that means the character is not in your party. Damn moderator ninjas.

You will be able to completely fill up 5 assuming you do everything. If you grind, you might be able to reach the 6th, but you will end the game somewhere between 25 and 30. Proficiencies, I highly recommend Life Steal on Gracious Repose and Endless Wrath on Unbridled Wrath. Life Steal is really helpful to heal up in combat (especially on big AoE abilities), Endless Wrath makes the thing regenerate 300 focus total (10 per second). Between the two you have literally infinite sustainability in combat for health, power, and power orbs. As long as you have 1 Power Orb you can fully recover from 1 hit point and zero focus in a short order in the middle of a fight. The rest is up to your taste. Personally, I recommend pumping Executioner's Charge on Heroic Charge and Lightning Precision on Blade Dash. Those two give you very good damage for bosses/groups and very, very good mobility. All other skills are mostly offer some sort of disable either naturally, through proficiencies, and/or through being Empowered; so put points in whichever you like most. Note, both of Earthrending Strike proficiencies are rendered moot if you will want to abuse its Empowered version because it naturally has massive range and knockdown. Both of Vanguard Strike's proficiencies can also be considered moot because the Empowered Version already does knockdown and doesn't cost any focus. I would consider those two skills as expensive, slow, hard hitting nukes. Wind Shear and Shield Bash can offer relatively quick AoE crowd control, though their damage is not as impressive as EarthVangStrikes and they don't offer the mobility of Charge/Dash. Talents is easy. The entire top row is fantastic; 3 damage boosters that all 3 of Attack, Agility, and Will great for increasing Lucas's damage; the 20% chance to heal per kill talent is the perfect addition to Graceful Repose's Life Steal to allow you easy healing on the battlefield. Both Focus generating talents are fairly redundant and useless if you are using the 300 Focus generating skill buff. Trade Maser is useless, you will have far more gold than you will ever need to spend. The bottom row has some decent choices. Death Defying can help you save on the reloads when you screw up, Cull the Weak is pretty good if you don't want use my suggested Charge/Dash combo, and Rejuvenation is just plain decent to speed up your healing.

Bah, Earthquake. Too slow, too unwieldy, and the empowered version literally replaces the need for putting any points in either evolution because it naturally knocks things down and has absurd range. Personally I only used it because of its efficiency - its very cheap on power cost for the empowered version and it wiped out the mass of cannon fodder enemies at the start of a fight. Attempting to use it in the actual fight just gets you killed in about 2 seconds because it takes a couple of years to play the stupid animation. Blade Dash? Almost instant, avoids attacks, and makes you bounce like a pinball with a high power orb start. And its evolutions aren't automatically wasted when you empower it. As for heroic charge - is it really "100%" more damage? Ability damage is determined by adding up ability DPS and attack DPS; and that upgrade only increases ability DPS. And Vanguard Strike already fulfills the purpose of being the "opener" dash move against single targets. I guess if you itemize almost entirely for will offensive it will end up doing more damage that way, but I doubt that's true for a more balanced build.

As a side note, yes, it is hell worth it. Empowered Abilities are basically "iwin" buttons. It seems to take takes about 200 casts for most of them, not sure what is the ratio is for timed abilities. Or maybe its per focus point spent. Either way, its takes a while to power them up. So don't be afraid to spam them at every opportunity. The only issue is that some empowered abilities are so good you might find it hard to resist from casting them every fight, which might make it difficult to empower other abilities.

Withering is the damage amplifying one, right? Do you remember what chaos value it had? Personally, I am in love with Doom now on crit heavy characters. I had a combined DPS of about 400 from Attack and Ability towards the end of the game, about 120ish doom on Sword/Shield, and 240ish doom on my 2 hander. An Empowered Vanguard's strike opened with 1.8k to 2.4kish damage on crits. Heroic Charge basically killed the archon enemies in 1-2 hits; the Daevas were a bit tougher and relied on 1-3 Vanguard Strikes to bring them under the 50% HP threshold. A singled Blade Dash on 4 Power Orbs with that set up melted armies and kept me at full HP. Was quite the lulz.

Yes, there is more to depth in combat than complexity of controls or number of basic actions a player can take; which is how I expect for Diablo 3 to make up for the deficiency of the simplistic interface and input - with intelligent monster (behaviors, abilities, group compositions) design, resource management that remains relevant through out the entire game, high enough difficulty so that you can't just spam your lolwin skill to victory. Interesting and impacting buffs/debuffs can play a strong role in the tactics, etc. etc. etc. But Diablo 2 has none of those things for the vast majority of character builds. There was a threshold of defensive attributes to not be instagibbed, a threshold of boosts for your strongest offensive ability to kill fast... and that's it. You plowed forward on basically an autopilot. You kited melee things that killed you faster than you killed them (or killed you on their death throes), you side stepped some projectiles (IIRC only Hell Gloams and a few bosses shot fast enough to make the dodges somewhat difficult and they were negated mostly by not having bad resists anyway). Some situations might become more involved for the less conventional builds that don't have a "nuke everything" button or a massive attack/defense steroids, but gameplay moments that demanded the correct and well timed reaction that wasn't kiting were incredibly rare. Dungeon Siege 3 doesn't have even 1% of the variety or the nuance/complexity in character builds that Diablo 2 had, but I can safely say that in combat, I had to pay far more attention in DS3 than in D2 to survive, even more attention to not get hit, and more importantly, impacting use of some abilities required positioning/timing/planning. In and of itself DS3 didn't end up having a particularly impressive amount depth because some tools in combat were rather spectacularly overpowered (infinite dodge rolls extinguishes the challenge out of yet another hack'n'slash) and enemy behavior wasn't particularly varied, but it still an improvement over anything else I played in the Diablo-like genre.

http://www.nowgamer.com/features/853/the-making-of-diablo Diablo's combat has been historically designed to be the simplest form of gameplay possible with a mouse. Nearly all requirements on the player lie with the knowledge of mechanics the player is expected to posses. While certain builds and PvP do ultimately have more of a physical skill and mental agility requirement than DS3, at its regular PvM Diablo's combat is dumber than a brick. Simple addition of the dodge and block actions with changes to the health/resource system make the fundamentals of combat in DS3 more complex than what is currently in Diablo and its family of games. Perhaps Diablo 3 will change, we will have to see. It's more than just Diablo 3. It's Torchlight 2, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn (Titan Quest guys), Hellgate: London (as much as it is destined to fail again), Sacred 2, and probably countless other upcoming games in the genre. It's also about the capabilities of the company to provide stable multiplayer (Obsidian has no real expirience here) and long term support. Obsidian *might* be able to pull of a miracle and outdo tens of development studios with stronger experience, but its asking them to focus on something that has never been their strength and not taking advantage of their writers. Maybe. Don't know whenever they can survive as a studio by making those kinds of games, though. Also, do they even get to pick their own projects? It looks like every game they made a Obsidian has been made on orders by a publisher with a rushed release deadline.

Conclusion - I disagree with ME's implementation of NG+ just as I would disagree with an implementation of it (especially in the shallow format that ME did it) in DS3. Was that so hard a point to get? Furthermore - Dungeon Siege 3 and Mass Effect are generalized to a greater expect than regular action RPGs such as Diablo. Diablo likes specialize almost entirely in character building and typically end up neglecting the depth of combat as well as depth of story. DS3 and ME sacrificed the typical extent of character building focus in favor of implementing story elements and hybridizing the nature of combat itself with something that is normally outside of the ARPG genre - for ME its shooters, for DS3 its games like Darksiders/God of War/etc. In case you are still missing the point and are stuck on "zomg look at this fanboy gotta e-fight with him!" - I am proposing that Obsidian continues on expanding in that direction (a blend of three game styles with focus on story, deeper combat mechanics, and a relatively small amount of character building) of instead of attempting to make this game more like Diablo and its family of games. Obsidian probably cannot compete in this genre (especially with Diablo 3 incoming), and it is folly to expect them to waste resources on such attempts.

Titan Quest was also quite possibly the most faithful Diablo clone out there, while this is not. ME's New Game + is trash. You replay the entire game for an achievement, a fraction of your levels for scaling, and no new items or designed difficulty mode.

Poor Reinhart. He easily had my favorite introduction but looks like he gets last billing in every case.

By the way, if you play as Katarina, who is the companion that joins you after you finish act 1 (right before the swamp), Lucas or Reinhart? Or neither and both join only in Stonebridge there? The way I understand the orders: LUCAS: Anjali (cage), Katarina (bridge), Reinhart(stonebridge) ANJALI: Lucas (cage), Katarina (bridge), Reinhart(stonebridge) REINHART: Anjali (cage), Katarina (bridge), Lucas (Stonebridge: Tomb of the Sacred Rose) KATARINA: Anjali (cage), ???, ??? Anyone knows?

And you need to be lucky to get a decent item out of that technique - store items are mostly terrible. Statistically you will probably get the exact item you want after a large number of reloads, but consider this: 1. To stack up a significant amount of a chaos stat you need to have multiple items for it 2. You need to still ensure that you don't miss out on other attributes because having low attack, low agility, low willpower, and low stamina for sake of having Chaos: thingmagic +80 isn't going to do you any favors 3. You will need to repeat that dance every time you find a new grade/tier of item quality (basically every time you find a new set of shops). Is it really worth it? This game has no persistent multiplayer and no shared stash, as well as being short. And the difficulty is mostly tied to your skill as a player and smart choices in character building rather than having an ideal set of items.

You get bonuses for reaching 25/50/75% of the bar. If I had to make an estimation, you can reach 75% influence with two allies and maybe 25-50% with the last towards the end of the game. I've maxed out Anjali and Katarina on separate playthroughs between halfway and three fourths into the game. Its rather simple to find how to raise influence - beating bosses or advancing past certain areas gives you influence to the current ally in party. You also get influence for making certain conversation choices - with Anjali you need to be militant (choose aggressive-justice-blunt oriented responses) and you always agree with Odo. With Katarina, you gain influence mostly by being pragmatic - ask for rewards, choosing the more convenient option over the more idealistic one, and always be open to making an alliance or manipulating. Lucas and Reinhart I haven't tried yet, but both look like they will mostly raise influence by picking "idealist goodie two shoes" responses, with big themes on forgiveness. If worst comes to worst, just save on a checkpoint before every major conversation with branches and keep trying until you wriggle out most of the influence out of that conversation. Note, not every conversation gives influence to every companion (Anjali couldn't give a damn about Stonebridge court cases, for example; while Katarina adores you for asking for money/bribes and choosing the "split both ways" on the goblin vs shopkeeper quest.), but every major quest conversation will typically give 2 potential influence raising responses total, with some giving only one and a few rare ones giving up to 3.

Haven't tried any of those. There are too many "Chaos" type items and the drop system is heavily biased towards giving you mostly Attack/Will/Agility. It's easy to stack up those offensive stats, but to stack up a specific "Chaos" stat to any real amount you need to be A. lucky, B. sacrifice the main offensive/defensive stats because an item is unlikely to have both a high chaos property and good offensive attributes unless it is a unique. And bosses seem to be highly resistant if not outright immune to many of the weakening effects you can put on them. Stuns barely last any duration on them, so I doubt Weakning/Withering fares as well. Plus, you would ultimately be relying on a chance to hit short duration debuff against enemies that are designed to kill you if you try to whack them for any real amount of time. If you have the items with high enough stat you could try, but I doubt its a viable strategy in the long run. So far, my best friends on Hardcore for Lucas have been Blade Dash with +50% crit, Executioner's Charge, and the three buffing skills. Item wise, I mostly relied on Attack/Will/Doom (and every once in a while I got a decent +agility item that didn't sacrifice the other stats). As well as lots and lots of dodging. If it helps, Stamina is a lot more valuable than armor - the damage reduction seems really bad, but having 1.5k HP or more does let you survive "glancing" 500-1000 damage hits long enough to dodge away and heal. Speaking of healing, Blade Dash is *fantastic* for it when you have +25% Life Steal from your healing skill. It will instantly top you off if you use an Empowered version, too, while finishing off all the rabble.

Pretty sure I understood :/. When you max it, at half HP you get a guaranteed crits until the thing drops dead. I simply prefer maxing it it on the threshold evolution because it makes a noticeable difference to be able to start unleashing bosses at 50% instead of 40%. Executioner charge 1-2 shots most things anyways; and for enemies heavy enough to be able to take multiple critical hits from it you want to start landing those critical hits faster. You also need to remember that for most abilities, damage comes from adding up both attack DPS and ability DPS (and some measure of base damage), so +20% ability DPS is closer to +10% total if your Attack/Willpower are equal, or is even lower than that if you favor attack DPS more than will DPS (which you should because Lucas does a lot of regular hitting).

Well, it's a 50% threshhold for 100% crit; with the +50% crit damage trait and some "Doom" on your items it comes out to quite a bit more than +20% DPS. Towards late game, with 3-4 Power Orbs, Wrath (focus regeneration running), you can put down 6 Exectuioner Charges for 800+ damage each in about 3 seconds. It's shocking how fast it melts bosses. From what I remember about her second form, as long as you move her little explosions she sets up under you don't actually hit you. Her biggest threat is that salvo of homing missiles and she always telegraphs it with a quick animation and/or blabbing. Just dodge towards them, it takes a little bit of practice. That really summarizes most of bosses on hard-core - they do 1/3 to 1/2 of a second to telegraph an attack that is probably going to kill you in 1 hit or leave you near dead. Some don't even have the courtesy to telegraph and simply are guaranteed to use *something* painful against you as soon as you are in range. In such cases, dance around them to bait them into shooting the attack, immediately dodge in avoiding it and get a few hits in. If you can't get the timing right, you are probably frustrated from all the death and should take a break.

He is very slow. Kill off his support first, revive you inevitably dead ally, and then hit and run. Charge in, hit once, and jump out. If you do it quick you might even avoid the damage aura's burn, but you will still probably suffer one hit. Hit and run with Lucas is very easy because his third buff skill gives him insane focus regeneration. If you maxed out its +60% focus evolution, you can literally keep your focus and power orbs permanently maxed by juts spamming skills into the air.