morhilane

It's called weapon proficiency, it contains like half of POE1 general talents.

3 things happened to POE1 general talents: - They were moved to weapon proficiency and are still available to all - They were removed either because the mechanic doesn't work in POE2 or isn't needed anymore (cross-class talents) or balance reasons (the devs wanted to reduce the amount of +% damage or accuracy increase passives for example) - They were moved to a specific classes, usually one that would make use of it. These could probably be cleaned up, but there is like 1 or 2 per classes (that have passives). 90% of the things you see in the "trees" are class specific features from POE1 and they could be displayed exactly the same way in the previous game. The "general talents" are the weapon proficiencies and aren't displayed there.

Did you check your hit vs misses? Grazing is gone (by default, you need passives/buff to have it and it's all mostly on melee classes), that means you do 35% more misses than in POE1 at equal accuracy/deflection (doesn't seems like the window changed). Although, at some point I felt more like I have missing all the time with my character last night (5 misses in a row with 52 deflection vs 50 accuracy). Spell misses now, a lot. I'll check more maths tonight, there is a couple of other things that bother me. edit: For people wondering, the miss rate at equal deflection/accuracy is 40% now.

I personally had more issues with missing half the time than dealing low damage because of low penetration on weapons. I feels like the dev removed grazing (by default), but didn't change the deflection/accuracy window to compensate for 35% more misses.

You should watch the latest Q&A, devs were pretty much "do people realize they can use weapons on Monks????". I think it is clear that the Monk class is designed so you do pick and use weapons, not just your fists.

Penetration gained seems to be .5 per power level (going by what I saw on the Wizard last night). At max level, the difference is going to be a whooping 1 between multiclassed and not-multiclassed character. Also, the power level improving abilities seems to be a Wizard only thing in the beta...

It's a bug, already tracked by dev.

Barbarian, Rogue, Fighter and Paladin already have "weapons talents" in their "tree", it's just all unique per classes (Fighter and Rogue are the ones that force you into specific weapons the most). Ranger need a boost here (aka replace Gunner with something general and don't make them 100% ranged). I didn't check Monk, so no comment there. Now there is something that jump to me while looking at how the classes are made. There is 3 bucket of classes: - depends on auto-attacks (Fighter/Paladin/Rogue/Ranger/Barbarian/Monk) - depends on per-encounter spells (Chanter/Wizard/Priest) - hybrid (Cipher/Druid) The "weapon talents" are limited to classes that depends more on their auto-attacks, i.e. low maintenance classes, instead of depending on their per-encounter "spells". Cipher/Druid are hybrid because you can focus on either the shapeshifting/whipe improvement (passives) or picking more "spells". As for the Priest, I remember the devs saying a few weeks ago that they haven't decided who spell selection would work, so I'm kinda surprised we got "Wizard-light" for them. I suspect that class is unfinished right now. Also, like the Chanter, it might be suffering from the state of the Affliction/Inspiration mechanic.

Meals is what you want, they will grant multiple bonuses for one slot, but we can't craft them in the beta yet and they are rare outside of crafting from what I understood.

That is where the Affliction/Inspiration system fails. It should list the Afflictions it counters, not the related stats. Otherwise it is too obtuse to use, you have to check all the afflictions and mark down which one affect dexterity manually to know when to use that inspiration. In other word, having a Inspiration vs Affliction table is a lot easier to use than having to read both set entirely to know what counters what. You shouldn't have to deal with the stats, you just need to know buff/debuff and the name giving you a bit of a clue as to what it does. Enemies drop blind on you, you need to know which inspiration to use to counter it, not check the stats to find the one that matches.

In fact, I'm almost sure it's the other way round. They were rather often picked. I have a handful of friends and relatives who only played PoE1 once, and most of them didn't finish the game. When I've asked them what kind of build they made, they looked at me funny. When I said, what choices did you make when your character levelled up, it was pretty clear that the list was very varied and often anything but effective builds (they were almost anti-munchkin choices), like more slots for items or some specific resistance that sounded great, or more and more spells for your caster. The very claim "were never picked" must come from someone with a pretty good understanding of the PoE1 ruleset, i.e., a person of the kind that populates these forums. Wouldn't those players be a good reasons why the passives were fit into specific classes and not available to all around? Saying that, thinking about some of the passives I saw in the class trees last night, I think some exist to just exist. Example, the Gunner passive is Ranger only. First, Ranger doesn't spell guns to me so I'm not sure why it is in that class. Second it only affect a few weapons (3 from memory) who are way too slow with out the passive with the "slowed down" combat. Seems to me that instead of forcing people to max Dex or pick Ranger to use these weapons, the weapons themselves should be improved based on what the passive did and the passive should simply be removed. Same goes with the "stats resistance" passives, especially the bundles. I would suggest to remove them and tweak spells/abilities to deal with them instead. In the same optic though, I understand why the weapon style are in the Fighter class, that's actually a very 5e D&D thing to do and the other none-caster class have their passives that improve using weapons in general (well not the Ranger, who only has Gunner).

It certainly doesn't feel slow... Combat is way too confusing as is. Feels more like Tyranny and less like POE. Are you sure you are at normal speed? I made the mistake to go in fast mode to explore around the village and the first time I got in combat after a text interaction it stayed in fast mode and I get the impression that combat fast mode is faster than out of combat fast mode.

Not just a problem for the single class casters. If general talents are back, some of the other class will have to have features that are nerfed or lose class talent to compensate. Also, I think lots of people have issues with the active/passive selection at every level up. It's like they want the game to limit how much they can take on each side instead of them making their own builds. Right now they see all those passives and they believe they have to pick all of them or something.

I didn't check the value exactly, but my ranger was hitting too hard for it being 6-10 (unless the 6-10 is for the ticks?) or my penetration was giving me 130% damage. hmm. I do have the feeling it's not influenced by power level (Josh is a liar!), but I also feel like the tooltip is lying, lol.

You still have access to all the weapons proficiency (where most modals used to be universal talent in POE1), all 3 shields have defensive modals and base accuracy is the same for all. You can still make a battlecleric, is it going to hit harder than a Fighter/Rogue without using a buff, no, but it didn't in POE1 either because their accuracy sucked.

It doesn't seems to be displayed information unless you are looking at a Wizard spell. For example, the Ranger Wounding Shot only shows how much damage and penetration it has when getting the tooltip on the hotbar (the more details doesn't have the info). The info doesn't change with level up but I'm pretty sure my wounding shot did more than 6-10 damage at level 6...

The spore north of the village drops a grimoire, but only if you choose to fight it in the scripted interaction. I do not believe that grimoire had any special properties, just additional spells. You don't need to select attack in the interaction, if they spot it will trigger the fight as well and you get the grimoire. I don't remember it having special properties, but I found a wurm pet (one Poka something ruins map) that did grant a bonus (+5% to something).

Just you... My Mage was a top damage dealer last night. Note that the game doesn't really tell you but you should go do the first quest you are given out of the boat (given by Vektor). The rest of the island you first show up in is higher level than you.

New system means longer fights depends on how you manage your healing resources (for that encounter), not on how long it takes to reduce (POE1 version) health to 0. Which is an improvement in my book. In POE1 that forced you to reduce combat length, aka stack damage, in POE2 that means support has a more vital role. The injuries are inconsequential as in rest to remove them which everyone will do after gaining 2. In fact, I think they should just go with health = 0 means character death at this point.

What do you mean by passive? Isn't that just the UI label thing? I thought the chanting menu/system has remained as it was, with phrases being chanted sequentially. Btw, yeah, I remember as well, Josh was indeed mentioning that all phrases will be available for learning from the start. I was wondering at that time what he gonna do with Dragon Trashed. It's a label thing, kinda. The Chant are on the passive side, but Ancient Memory, which used to be a passive, is now a chant too, so the class has no passive at all. The class feels a lot more like just another Priest that you don't have to maintain as much.

Did you process your pledge (the manage pledges button)?

I ended up actually creating characters: - a Priest of Eothas (that was actually my POE1 character)...two Priests makes your party too weak so I restarted. - a Chanter, I think chants are actually bugged. I see my character "starting to chant" in the log, but not hits. So restart again. - a Ghost Heart, that one has been fun to play so far.

Some impressions and issues. Character creation: - Orlan female has a buggy hair selection where character is bald instead of having hair. - Deadfire Archipelago doesn't seems to give an attribute bonus - Some of the "job" only grant a +2 to a single skill instead of a total of +3 like the others (example: Laborer) - Sub-race don't display their special feature (are they in the beta?). - Going backward in character creation is somewhat annoying (can't click the step at the bottom, going back behave a bit weird once you hit classes). - In the last section, I would put face/hair selection before colors. I was going back to colors after selecting the hair. + I really like the new models and general artworks. Gameplay - Priest feels very limited with everything turned into a spell, the sub-class spell limitations and 0 passives. - Pure Wizard seems like a poor man Wizard, having access to all the spells in theory doesn't seem worth not getting a sub-class bonus. - Rapier and Estoc weapon proficiency have the same modal (I'm not sure if that's intended or not or just a text error in character creation). - I saw some warning on the map about level difference with an encounter flag, but I kinda didn't read them before clicking. Maybe this should be color-coded (like RED). Also, I decided to leave an encounter on the map and the message seemed to say "comeback later" but the encounter disappeared. - I'm a bit unsure how the averaged group skill work (as in when is it used). - Combat is still a bit of a cluster, I lost sight of my character a few times. I think they literally disappeared actually. - Merchant inventory needs separators between items. + Pathfinding looks so much better, I love the terrain affecting stride. Making barrels explode with a fireball is awesome. I also like per-encounter abilities quite a bit. Minor bug - Repair supplies has no icon, well I don't think a white box with a read X is the intended icon.

I personally don't find it more limited than POE1, although there is more class specialization here. It was clear that when Josh said there was too many bonuses in POE1 and the addition of multiclassing/sub-classes that some stuff had to be moved around or be removed. Although, my point of view might also be influenced by how I never bothered with the general talents outside offensive and the weapon&shield one and I have no issues using the weapon proficiency in Deadfire to get that back (and my weapon&shield character was always a fighter...). I usually stayed with the class talents, which are all pretty much still there for everyone (except Wizard/Chanter/Priest). I do think that the Priest lack something. They got a tiny pool of spells, that gets smaller based on their god and all their features were turned into a spell, even the god's favored weapon (instead of being a passive like in POE1). Wizard have lots of spells to pick from and their sub-class passives are pretty strong, aka base Wizard sucks without passives, the few more spells you get access to doesn't compensate. Chanter have their chant as passive which is kinda weird, especially when I remember Josh saying selection was not limited per level.???

There is a beta backer sub-forum, any feedback is going to go in there.