Shadenuat

I gotta play a Werewolf: Apocalypse party if Obsidian ever fixes difficulty so game would be worthy of replay some day; 5 dual class shifters for lulz.

Voted for Nemnok because he is the only god with quest with real player agency, disliked everyone else because of annoying interludes I have to mash 11111 to skip that don't matter ****.

Shifting is kinda nice in the beginning and for armor bonus, but doesn't really compare to real martial classes and multi-classes stacked with super equipment imo. Best druid is no-kit druid. The strength of the druid is versatility. Spells can do ton of cool things, druids have super heals (mass Robust, Moonlight), good attack spells (1st level Blind), debuffs (-10 acc against will, mass entangle), awesome defence spell (Adragan, forget about pierce&fire, and never get paralyzed), control (lightning spells) and blatantly overpowered aoe spells with raw damage (empowered Plague of Insects, tornado & storm). Summons compared to chanter are weak (except SLIME, as they are immune to INT afflictions and terrify vampires lol), but they can also help. Shifting is good because you get some serious armor buff and can still cast spells, really, I think that's their best part. The shifter kit can't even cast spells that seem like they were made for shift form (like that raw damage+heal bite) while shifted, so that's that. It probably would make more sense to make all spells affect single target/affect druid when shifted (so if you cast heal it works only on you). So just pick all the spells, items +power level and go to town.

The context is hermetic magic, which has roots in real history and where latin was a language of the educated. PoE's "lel souls do everything" is pretty dumb in comparison. It also doesn't stand to scrutiny, since everything about souls in PoE does pretty much same as any other fantasy magic, while at the same time lacking all the rules, nuances of something like, say, arcane magic in D&D with it's ingredients, counter spells, unique rules for magical creatures and so on. The best example is story in PoE2, by the way - "hunt god, get back your soul". Yet in the game, losing soul has less effect than Irenicus derping around with your soul in BG2 (you lose abilities, you turn into monster and suddenly kill your favorite waifu because you forgot to cast Stoneskin on her). Let's not be too apologetic about PoE setting here, because the implementation of it's core idea in the game so far was 1) dumb backer NPCs and 2) errrr not really anything else. For wherever you can use soulpowers in PoE, in any other RPG you could use some detect spell or find a note on someone's corpse. Designer(s) of PoE liked D&D4 with it's power pools and abilities for everyone, and "everyone is a mage". That's why game is like this, not because hand waving with souls. Arguably it could have done way better than bunch of mmo buttons, but buttons are easier to do than more complicated rules for physical classes (Codex Martialis comes to mind) or even good stealth (which wasn't even a thing in PoE1). In some way it does hurt the gameplay, since Rogues, for example, do not need any help from the party as they are both magical effect distributors, can stealth all by themselves and do stupid amounts of damage; so instead of working as a team with other party members (like casting mass invisibility with a wizard and ambushing with rogues for massive damage), you just mash same buttons all the time every battle and you're good. Hurr souls.

That's how Druid's spell that turns corpses to healing works I believe. That would have been quite cool.

Priest needs better spells and skill tree. That's it.

Sidekicks on average have more meaningful stats. Max Per on main character though. Is good.

Lol, "rogue/wizard gimped in BG2".

But they're not everything. Like, during boss fights/dragons/fap-myrs you're just having a penalty. +50% on barbaric blow is harsh because it's best barb's click-me button, and I want to click it ~5 times and then refresh and click it again as fast as possible, not to derp around clicking on dead enemies instead of alive enemies. Single barb at least needs no kits. Maybe if zerk also got Baldur's Gate immunities, then maybe.

Priest spells are mostly junk. Fast cast for a single lowest tier Inspiration does not make it a good spell. Paladin's upgraded Lay on Hands is better than any heal Priest has. And Druid as single class caster just laughs at Priest spell repertoire.

I played 1.1 PoTD till level 17 and before I could think about it had galleon with all the cannons, everyone in great stuff & usually have 80k in pocket change. Just do not upgrade bad items and don't do worthless upgrades. Most of the time Enchanting is nothing but money sink because enchants are often terrible and not worth your time ("heal 3 hp for 6 secs on crit for 9 secs" and all that dumb ****). You only want to increase quality of your weapons to superb+ and maybe do some key upgrades that are actually really good (like +power levels), buy good stuff and invest into good ship to 1-shot any other ship quickly and get their loot. Then sail around like a boss.

Just fight it from the north, enemy pathfinding is too bad and panthers will just derp around. Maybe dragon even burns them with you. If you're druid you should have picked Woodskin already, then fire damage won't bother you. If you have wizard, Chillfog for days. If you have Chanter, you want to summon at all times anything near drake itself - it will re-aggro on summon and won't ever bother you. Party like physical main+story companions will probably be brutally hard though, you'll probably have to kite, use grenades and drugs.

Honestly the best part of Rage is speed bonus and everything else is basically a debuff and bunch of weakest inspirations which can be replicated by other abilities. Might just not upgrade it and pick passives instead for more profit.

You're few years too late, when PoE1 was kickstarted people did point out how anime/mmo "everything is soulpower" was. Well I did anyway.

Last time I played pure Wizard (Transmuter) I wore Patinated Plate + tower shield with armor aura to screw with dumb AI which likes to attack low hp targets and still landed all the spells I want.

The point is to only pick 1 wizard spell per level and use good grimoire like Ninagauth's, while picking best druid spells. You get some of the best healing and support spells in the game and can combine multiple items with bonus power levels and other spell buffs to get load of spells that can deal with anything. Then again after you get Insect Plague and staff +3 to Beasts, you don't *really* need much else but 900 hardtack to press the awesome button.

Go from south, kill dudes to the left first. Then kill mage lady & and friends separately. Maybe get Aloth before that.

I think with new PoTD asassin is not really useful. You only have a few backstabs, and enemies are numerous and tough. On higher levels it might be better, but as I played through levels 1-12, fights are simply too long to waste ability points on extra damage once or twice. It's much better to run something like fighter/basic rogue and use gouging strike on everything and just auto-attack. You may think "well I'ma gonna remove that 1 important dude and win the fight". But there are now 2-3 important dudes usually, and really, if the mob is really hard, you're not going to remove it by your single asassin, it's not IE game. You can still use backstab sometimes, but running a build for that is not necessary. It's a lot better to focus on straight fighting and damage, and survivability instead.

Firebrand is Fire/Pierce. It penetrates mobs weak to fire regardless (PoTD+Level Scaling). It's supah against trolls/shadows. They should make every summon spell like this.

boy, look at all them 5% on everything! on crit! for 2 seconds! much great design.

More reasons to play game like it's supposed to be, as Storm of Zehir, with your party of best adventurers. Why please anyone, especially if they're bland and dumb anyway? If you're not getting feeling of camaraderie in your party, and in PoE2 you don't because characters do not create groups with similar alignments and interests, because they're underdeveloped and there is simply not enough of them to create all adventure groups we usually see in fantasy; then hirelings/mercs it is.

One thing that seems like missed opportunity for abilities are keywords. They should have more of them. Like Ranger's Binding Roots: Conjuration, Plant More syngeries for classes and items.

What do you peoples think about Supress all positive/negative afflictions spells. Like when you try to counter vampires and they cast this and still charm you Or when you eat drugs, someone casts it, you get instant drug crash, then supress ends and you have both effects running - positive and negative Or when you try to counter fear, get supressed, and don't counter fear Of course it works the other way around - someone tries anything, priest spams supress, yolo For the level these spells are at, seems kinda dumb to me, since they just counter any counters, turning any magic play into very dumb thing. It's not even dispel/breach or like, they just kinda... cancel the affliction system. Or maybe I am not entirely correct at how this works? Then there's reflection. I guess it doesn't work against AOEs (I think? because I think I once had summoned tentacles reflected on me, or maybe it was simultaneous summon... but it did feel like it), but aside from removing time from positive effects, I'm not sure how two mages cancel this. Just throw spells at each other?

but did they nerf hardtack

The whole approval system could have been scrapped for something simplier and with more dialogue for companions. It's an example of unnecessary complicated mechanic created for a completely trivial thing like flavor party banter.