limaxophobiacq

Not one mention of Abydons Hammer? Does no one comment on it just because its so late in the game? Because I dont think any two-hander can really compete with it for a fighter. Sure others do more damage but with decent INT the Charge (with +4 might) into Ring of the Ancient Forge combo every encounter for easy 15 second large AoE stun is so much more impactfull than a little bit more weapon damage.

+Main plot feels more interesting so far but I haven't beaten it yet. The minus collumn is mostly combat for me: -Watching 20+ cooldowns spread over 4 characters and then using then using each and every one when they refresh feels like a chore, as does pre-buffing. I don't think they're going to switch PoE 2 over to a cooldown system but I really dont want pre-buffing introduced into PoE 2. -Inflicting status effects on enemies feels less impactful than in PoE, so combat feels like its mostly about prebuffing and spamming damage spells and abilities compared to PoE where you layer combinations effects on enemies to weaken them up for your attacks. Keep strong focus on status effects from PoE. -Spell and ability visual effects are really minimal compared to PoE, and all kind of look the same. Half the time I feel like I only know what happened because i see it in the combat log and the ability goes on cooldown. This might be part of the reason they dont 'feel' impactful. PLS keep big flashy and unique spell animations and sound effects.

I'm playing on hard and I'm hating the combat. I've only had to reload from dying once (I've also reloaded for wounds and not wanting to rest again not knowing how much time I need) but I don't feel like I'm getting information on whats going on and I don't feel in control, and I'm someone who really likes PoE combat. Also prebuffing is back (and Lantrys party-wide buff before combat feels like a necessity) but I keep forgetting to do it because I'm now used to it not being a thing. Also combat takes so long you also have to remember to re-apply it mid-combat when it runs out.

I do combat at normal speed but I have it on autopause on the start of combat, whenever an enemy targeted by a part member goes down, and when anyone finishes an ability/spell.

Was there some bug with Bash and Carnage I wasn't aware of, or does this mean Bash doesnt trigger carnage attacks now like when they changed retaliate to not trigger carnage?

I'm extremely sceptical to this, primarily because as it currently stands on many spell levels for both priests and druids all but 1 or 2 spells are bad and if they cut the wrong ones some spell levels will have nothing worth casting in them. Druid level 7 spells already have this problem (you'd never actually use any of them in a serious fight and you'd be way better of every time with 4 more castings of level 5 spells) and even druid 8th only has 1 really good spell (Avenging Storm). Wizards OTOH get multiple great spells on every level. Also if you start giving the priests only some of the current priest spells no one in their right mind would play a priest of a god that doesn't get Devotions/Crowns for the Faithfull and the Prayer Against spells but outside of those which are the bread-and-butter of the class there could maybe be more variation between different deities but OTOH thats a lot of work on spells that most people will never see.

Shield + One Hander works better for paladin (especially with the small shield thats only useable by pladins called outworn buckler available for purchase early in the game). Also I think you'll want lay on hands for that party. Put the two-hander on the fighter instead they do more weapon damage than paladins anyway outside of Flames of Devotion and the paladin can use a firearm for the flames and then switch to shield + weapon. Once you have HoF barbarian is best for dual-wield or weapon + bashing shield. The speed bonus from dual-wielding also goes well with attack speed from Frenzy so you attack really fast. For the ranger I don't think any other pet can compare to Stag, carnage with the high base damage and DR penetration of animal companion attacks is fantastic early game even with the small AoE. Later in the game pet defenses lag way after characters that can use equipment and stag or no stag they are limited in what they can do becaue they get CC'd all the time.

No, it's a bug. Both hands attacks use the same weapon for carnage hits - not sure how the game picks which weapon is used. Seems to always be the left-hand weapon, which also goes first when you HoF. Actually, if the weapon in the right hand is only used for (half of) the HoF attacks themselves and not the carnage attacks they create, Unlabored Blade might actually be one of the better weapons in the game to have in your right hand for HoF; it's got the best accuracy in the game so its sure to create lots of carnage attacks that you then do with your heavy hitting left-hand weapon so the low dagger damage doesnt matter that much, and not being able to get more than 1 proc from Firebug is not a big deal when it only does the HoF attacks themselves.

Oh, I got them mixed up. Yeah its Eotun, Binding Rope is certainly better, I don't really have good track of all the stronghold adventure reward items.

I'm a bit surprised at no Barbaric Retaliation + Blood Thirst, it seems like you'd would do a lot of extra damage that way on such a slow attacking barbarian. For those less fashion conscious, might this be a good setup?: (I like to leave the binding rope on a priest because as long as priest isn't disabled no one else stays disabled for long)

Check which weapon does the carnage hits. If it's Spelltongue then you should steal enough time. If the carnage hits are done with the other weapon then it steals nothing. Landed 18 hits with a HoF just now (I checked and all carnage hit were with spelltongue,) and got about 4 seconds to my durations, and then 23 Spelltongue hits for 6 or so on another. So about 0.2-0.25 to durations per hit. Does that sound about right?

I'm currently trying to make a spelltongue barbarian work (3.04 beta) and I'm kind of confused, because the 'drain' effect from spelltongue seems really inconsistent about when it works and when it does not. I've Heart-of-Furied some groups of enemies with no timed buffs on them and gotten huge boosts to the duration of all my active effects (like 40 second +25% damage from heart of fury, almost a minute on Savage Defiance and Frenzy), and then against other groups it seems to add no time at all to the buffs or very very little. I have spelltongue in the left hand to make sure it hits first with HoF.

Zephyr has to hit vs. Will first though, and I think the longer interrupt and how much easier it is to have faster attack speed with dual-wielding with Vile Loner or Mosquito or Shatterstar would make a bigger difference than +20 interrupt.

I've preordered it so I'll definitely be playing. I like what I've seen of the story/characters/writing but I have some concerns about the system even though obviously getting to designing spells is fun. I'm not a fan of skills improving through use, it creates stupid confilcts of incentives, like if your end game build isn't going to be casting X-type spells, you should never cast X-type spells even if it in the moment is the strongest choice because doing so will increase your X-skill (which you're eventually not going to use at all) at the expense of your other usefull skills. Also some skills seem to have noticably less impact on the effects of the abilities/spells that use them than other skills do*, which means investing in those skills is a bad investment, and with using a skill equaling investing in that skill that means you should avoid using those abilities as much as possible. *F.ex. from what I've seen the offensive magic skills seem to have great impact on the effect of offensive magic you use as the skill is used for the attacks accuracy, while the effect of the healing or buffing magic skills on those spells aren't nearly as impactful and they work almost as fine with low skill as high. Which means you should avoid casting heals and buffs as much as possible and only use them when you really need to since increasing those skills is a bit of a waste. I could be mistaken of course I haven't played it and I've not been able to find any thorough overview of the game mechanics but from what I've seen from the tooltips and such describing what skills do it kind of seems that way.

Now that I think about it, +140% and +260% correspond to a x2.4 and a x3.6 multiplier respectively, when bloodlust is a +20% or x1.2 multiplier, so maybe they're getting added together somehow and instead of multiplying attack rate by x1.2 its adding +1.2? Or it might just be coincidence that those were the numbers I saw.

Report written. Happened with regular auto-attacks.

3.04.1158 beta (still bugged in 1165) +140% in this case but earlier it managed +260% Replicate by equipting Spelltongue and attacking the big group of crucible knights in the next room with regular auto-attacks. Didn't happen with DaoM. Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/llwp8023vy3r33o/fa3f59669b09445f81330190166690b8%2031845537%20CrucibleKeep.savegame?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ij8tqgbt0ctq092/output_log.txt?dl=0

Welp. Seems I'm not going with Spelltongue. Or at leas not spelltongue + bloodlust as when I tried it I ended up with a +260% attack speed bonus. Is Bloodlust coded to stack with everything including itself maybe? Because it doesnt happend with DaoM. Also it seems to again(still?) prolong buffs even when attacking enemies without buffs, though certainly not by 5 seconds per hit but something much smaller. It's a very confusing weapon. Would be cool when it worked, but 25% chance on kill isn't exactly reliable.

I'm testing Unlabored Blade in 3.04, and after the deaths of many many crucible knights (a nice large group with decent hp who pose no chance of actually hurting me, sadly I dont have a save with a fully upgraded weapon and easy access to any notable encounters) I have some conclusions: 1: Firebug stops juming after it kills someone! This might be old news but I didn't know this. 2: It still doesn't seem like it can trigger more than once per HoF. Maybe this could be related to the crucible knights just dying but I don't think so. It triggers as often as one would expect on normal attacks with carnage. 3. The Firebug on the Unlabored Blade actually has higher base damage than the druid spell, 40-50 instead of 30-40. That's a lot of damage. An insane amount of damage if there was actually enough high-hp low-deflection enemies around that you'd get close to all 8 jumps. Despite its less than spectacular performace with HoF its still pretty amazing. If you had weapons and kraken/dragon eyes to spare I guess you could HoF and then switch to Unlabored. Considering Dual-Wielding it either with Spelltongue + Vulnerable Attack or Drawn in Spring (with no Vulnerable Attack). Both should have practically no recover with plate and frenzy when everything is durganized.

Well if you're dual-wielding durgan drawn-in-springs I think you'll be very near 0 recovery as long as you're in frenzy anyway, so Blood Thirst or Bloodlust wouldn't be worth it. With Durgan weapons and full plate armor (and frenzy and two-weapon style) it should work out to 1.15*1.2*1.33 + 0.5 - 0.35 = 1.9854 so 1.46% recovery if I understand attack speed right, and if it's sanguine plate you should be in frenzy all the time. OTOH if Unlabored Blade is actually fixed in 3.04 and you can trigger it multiple times on HoF it might be that no other weapon is even meaningfull for barbarian after that point against anything but fire-immune enemies. I should probably try 3.04 beta and test.

This is pretty tangential but its about a barbarian ability: how does Wounding from Drawn in Spring interract with Heart of Fury? I recall there being some problems with a DoT effect being applied multiple times in one instant, so I wonder if you get full Wounding damage on all the hits?

Is there any video where you can see the tooltip for the Control Vigor or Control Life skills? The tooltips for the other magic skills say they increase chance for hit and crit but since I assume buffs and heals don't need to roll to hit your own party members (that would be silly) I wonder what they do.

When they designed the game they made the encounters for hard mode first, then made normal and easy by removing enemies and PotD by adding some. PotD also has increased stats for all enemies, while on easy/medium/hard enemy stats are the same. Would definately not take Expert Mode on a first playthrough.

If you're dual-wielding I'd say Bloodlust and no Blood Thirst since it's pretty easy to hit 0 recovery with Bloodlust + Dual-Wield at which point Blood Thirst does nothing. If you're going one-handed + shield or two-handed Blood Thirst is probably better.

So for the spell creation system, can a character use one core for multiple different spells at the same time, or is a core used to build one spell 'used up'? Like if I have the base lightning core that you get for chosing lightning magic at character creation, can I use it with an increased range accent and equipt the long-range lightning in one spell/ability slot and then use the same core with an AoE accent to create an AoE lightning spell and equipt that in another slot? I was assuming you could but looking at streams every time its diffrent kinds of spells in every slot. Could you make two identical spells and equipt them in differenet slots so you get two uses of it? Also what does 'Spell Strength' (from Wits) affect? I assume it increases spell damage but does it also increase other spell effects? Would a haste spell make targets faster and a strength buff give more strength bonus if you have higher 'Spell Strength'?