morhilane

My first playthrough of POE1 was without a Priest (once I got enough party members to ditch Durance) at release and I found it easier than when I did it playing as a Priest in another playthrough. I never understand people saying that POE1 party required a Priest personally.

Then end of update 45 made me remember the existence of the The Playfair cipher.

Not sure the AI is that intelligent. Plus this counts only with melee, nothing we cannot handle easily using other means. Besides it requires a lot of work to make the conditions suitable for this. Actually the lack of intelligence makes this much more likely to happen. My beta experience had enemies activating skills and then switching to another party member which required them to walk across half the battle field to reach getting disengagement attacks along the way.

Does it still have the "no constant recovery" penalty? Anyway, go back to harder penetration penalties and reduce proficiency/weapon slots for everyone so not every classes can be a Black Jacket. People aren't going to like that though...because No Pen, No Pen, No Pen on everyone else.

Drunken (Dwarven) Defender build...wouhou. Now wait until you meet enemies monks that use Blade Turning and blitz around breaking engagement.

I doubt you can switch it off, but Josh said that the party was enough to crew the starter ship and I don't think they have a moral/supplies cost. Saying that, not crewing the ship probably means ignoring all the ship related features outside moving around on the map too.

Yeah, this is exactly how I feel too. And as DexGames so aptly demonstrated, our party of five will be "proficient" with every single weapon, shield, etc and then some with this new every third level. Personally, I find this even worse. I'd rather have two picks, one per every tenth level or something, if you'd twist my arm. I reckon, it's pretty clear that Josh is adapting the game for the casuals (statistics showing that a normal person play like 30-70% of the game once), so he's opted for the inclusive approach, whereas I love the opposite: the exclusive approach, where it soon becomes clear to me that my party with one single class druid, one single class rogue, one fighter/wizard, one pally/monk and one single class cipher, all having made specific class choices at that, with a few select weapon proficiency picks, is something clearly different than my second party with a single class priest, a single class spell wizard, a chanter/rogue, a ghost wolf ranger and a single class fighter, for instance. I'm not sure the design is being adapted to the "casuals" with this change, there was already no penalty for not being proficient in a weapon, all you are missing out is the modal. "Casuals" are the less likely to turn on modals or switch weapons. They will complains about "No Pen, No Pen, No Pen" though...if that is even a thing once the game release the way things are going. In fact, I have no idea who complained about the lack of proficiency "slots"...someone must really like the modals, lol.

Is it weird that I personally would have reduced the amount of proficiency gained instead of increasing it? I find one every four level to be too much already, I have no idea what I'm going to do with one every three levels. Maybe if there was a negative impact in using a weapon without the proficiency it might be better, but as it is now you just do it to have a modal that might be useless or only useless in certain conditions. And yeah, it reduce the Black Jacket utility even more, not that anyone was going to run that sub-class anyway. I'm wonder why Josh is concentrating so much on the idea that players should switch weapons. It failed in POE1 from what I can see. They aren't going to do it in POE2, they are just going to focus on getting enough Pen to not sucks. Nobody wants the hassles of having to switch weapons outside maybe ranged vs melee. It's a dead end design.

I'm reading and writing in the PoE forum a lot and nearly since the beginning of PoE. Here, there was no substancial feedback like: druid and priest spells are to many: seriously? Too many spells? That's like saying "My mom bought too much ice cream". I didn't read a lot of complaints about the armor system in this forum. Sure, it had its shortcomings the higher the damage output gets, but it wasn't a major issue, at least not here. The armor system could have been made less mushy with a percentage based DR value. Same with DR bypass. I can't say how much I want to punch those people in the shoulder who play PoE like one time and than say that something feels generic. Also, here in the forums I read very little about this. Where do the TON of people come from? [skip] The 3 I left in the list I've seen a lot on other forums. The armor one came up a bit on the POE forum early on, mostly from people who expected AD&D carbon copy mechanics I think. I haven't seen complains post game release over the DR system (outside the scaling toward end game). This seems to have been a case of Learn2Play. The "it's generic", I've seen that a lot in other forums and even had arguments over it. Note that there is two group saying that though. One just hate Josh "no bad build" ideas and constructed some (false) fantasy over what it means and what is in the game based on that. The others are just annoyed with the class system being very close to a wannabe classless system with a bunch of cosmetic choices (i.e. you can make a Wizard in heavy armor fighting with a two-handed sword). The druid and priest one, I've seen people complaining about having no idea what did what a lot early on. This was clearly a case of Learn2Play, but it seems to have stuck with Josh. I think a lot of initial "negative" feedback for POE was entirely the cause of "this isn't exactly like BG2, I didn't want to learn all these new systems".

Maybe someone in Deadfire marketing team is just putting his/her old GOG game codes in there to screw with us?

We actually know why they were changes, most of them were explained prior to Deadfire beta starting. The thing is that after Beta 1 people complained and Obsidian reverted some of them which borked the systems even more. The issue has always been (including early POE1): I die too fast/much, I can't do anything and I don't know why. The first part, "I die too fast" is simple: your characters get demolished in a few seconds by enemies. This is mostly because your party is always outnumbered by enemies with lots of HP that hit like trucks (by the way, seems like Obsidian totally forgot that they tuned down encounter size in POE1 like 3 times post-release, removing one party member doesn't mean you can inflate encounter size again). Enemies and encounters are balanced as if the game was only played by min/maxers too (which is basically the only people bothering with the beta at this point from the looks of it, I personally stopped caring when Obsidian added grazing back in Beta 2 showing they were just reacting to player's demands instead of actually having a idea of what was wrong with their system). The "I can't do anything" is because of the recovery system, which was made even slower in Beta 3. It requires too much timing and anticipation from the player to react to enemies attacks because everyone is acting on different sized rounds (recovery + action time) and the characters looks unresponsive while doing their idle recovery animation. Now though, the slower recovery in Beta 3 gives you a larger window to act (which is why I personally like it), but again Obsidian did a change and didn't bother tweaking everything around it (movement speed in combat is too fast for the recovery speed which is causing issues). The "I don't know why" is just confusion caused by the other two elements. Looking at the log to see why the character died is not that hard but you won't be able to do much against it and recovery has an icon, but clearly players have no idea what it means and does...

Quaterstaff's modal is a deflection bonus already.

I vote for Kablooie!!

I like the slower recovery as well, it makes combat less messy to follow. I do think that enemies might have too much hit points though, but I had the same issue in POE1 too.

I don't think they have more hp than in POE1 (well not what I checked in beta 1), most enemies outside of level 1-2 critters have over 100 hp in the first game (a level 4 dank spore has ~210 hp). Saying that, the latest recovery increase means everything takes longer to kill (including the party) in term of time. You need the same amount of hits as before, but you hit more slowly. I personally like the change (to recovery, spell casting still need a pass though), but I do think enemies (especially when there are a lots of them) have too much hp (as they did in POE1).

The beta only allow character to reach level 9 (so ability level 5), abilities beyond that aren't available.

It's nautical terms. Ship sides (where are starboard, port and stern). A jibe is a maneuver that change the swing the windsail from one side to the other which lead to a course change for the boat. See real life example.

A new patch! Looks like balance is better this time around. I do agree that single weapons looks a bit meh. Does the math to get those numbers account for the bonus accuracy tied to only holding one weapon (+12 acc)? On paper, I like the slower weapon recovery. I will have to see what it does in game though.

I agree though I feel that is a foregone conclusion in almost all RPGs, is it not? There aree always the best weapons, armors, abilities and spells that end being abused. Even in PnP game engines you pretty much see this universally. Power gamers (basically most posters who play the heck out of the game) will always dig them out as that is half the fun for some. RPGs usually don't put talents/abilities like "deal unarmed damage, but less than a full Monk" flavor skills for players who wants to play a Monk but don't want to pick the Monk class or multiclass into it. In fact, most RPGs don't have much character customization outside picking a class and sticking to it. Even D&D, that people around here praise for its choices is way more restrained and going outside the class usually means penalties. The only end results is that POE1 (and soon POE2) classes are going to all feel seamy again. But Josh doesn't care, he prefer classless systems.

Happy Holidays Obsidian!

Beta access is available via higher level tiers or an add-on (~$20, still available I believe).

You're missing the point here. It doesn't matter whether it's by big or small numbers, spellcasters should not be tankier than melee classes. Period. But with new system they will be. I'm confused. Spellcasters start with a penalty to their deflection, which isn't overcome even by maxing out Resolve. How will they be better tanks in the new system? Only barbarians have lower base deflection, and only Fighters have higher. Everyone else starts with 20 so a Paladin = Wizard = Rogue The Paladin base deflection doesn't include their "faith & conviction" bonus, they actually have the highest "base" deflection of all the classes. And without the stats change, the Wizard were already the kings of deflection. Their instant cast defensive spells grants at least +40 deflection right now.

Cyan circle for neutral will clash with the colorblind mode.

Not just for the first half technically, D&D attack resolution is that at equal to-hit vs AC (i.e. equal challenge rating) you miss about 50% of the time. But, D&D encounter design is that enemies will be dead by the 5th weapon swing most of the time unless they are a "boss encounter". That is clearly not the case of POE/POE2, everything is basically an HP sponge. It's probably balanced like that because health/endurance regen and weapons are on paper dealing a lots of damage (but with DR and now AR that isn't what is happening). End result: people stack damage to reduce TTK and assure the party survivability, because the game mechanics are piss poor in term of defensive support too (and even more in Deadfire, the Priest was nerfed so much in regard to that)

You still have ~%5 of chance to miss in Deadfire with a 43 difference between accuracy and defense (in POE1 that was a %5 of grazing). Your "Roll: 3" is like rolling a 1 on a d20 in D&D: automatic fail.