rjshae

I hope their priority is patching bugs.

A person who finds the whole patching/refinement cycle unbearable can always just wait. There's plenty of other fine games out there to enjoy.

I don't see many appealing matches in the Group stage. The best look to be Portugal v. Spain (6/15) and England v. Belgium (6/28). But perhaps there will be a surprise or two? Maybe Mexico v. Germany or Costa Rica v. Serbia?

In fairness, that letter written by Sawyer is framed in a very biased and inaccurate manner. For example, he statement " Which set of changes do you think I heard more feedback about? If you guessed the marginal drop in proc rate on the soulbound item that had only worked properly for two weeks, you’d be right." is...intellectually dishonest. The dagger in question had it's proc rate dropped from 10% to 3%; that's not "marginal", that's 2/3rds of it's bonus proc percentage. But acknowledging that doesn't hep the narrative Sawyer is trying to frame, so he implies that it's a smaller change than it actually is. The whole thing is full of stuff like that; it's not an honest discussion of why Sawyer believes these things so much as it is a justification for his view of game systems. I have to disagree, and you prove Josh's point about feeling losses more than gains nicely in a way. In cognitive psychology there's a concept called loss aversion that fits this behavior in a fairly nice way.

Particularly freakish party members would require a lot more reactivity for proper immersion, which would likewise raise development costs. It's probably better just to leave them as potential crew members.

I suppose they could implement a dynamic zoom-in that starts you at the same zoom as outside, then adjusts (zooms-in) to the room dimensions. Would that preserve the immersion?

Spoiler warning?

Do you suppose developers add "cut content" easter eggs just to befuddle the inquiring mind?

And not just D&D, but the rather constrained AD&D version of the system used in Baldur's Gate.

Selection bias: the barbarians and rogues you encounter possess these abilities. That's not a random sample.

My understanding is that this only applies to beings whose souls are not "fractured". For most of the population, these powers are beyond them as fracturing is a cumulative process during the recycling of souls. Hence, you and your party are (supposedly) relatively uncommon in possessing these abilities. This makes it akin to possessing superpowers in a heroes campaign.

Hmm. Well, the OP neglects to mention that single-class Priest gains access to higher level spells and abilities more rapidly than multi-class, which is THE main reason to go single-classed in the first place.

Yes, it seems likely that this is the type of game that does require a lot of fine tuning. The devs are giving the players a lot of choices in character creation, so the state space for all possible configuration combinations will be enormous. It wouldn't surprise me to see many more refinements in the coming months.

I wonder if there would be a console command to find out, maybe someone from Obs could weigh in here? I've had a couple of instances now where the Steam library page for PoE2 shows the DLC in the list, but it has a state of "Not Installed". If I deselect then reselect the DLC, it downloads something then sets it to installed. Perhaps then there's a bug and this is a work-around.

This DLC interface is squirrely. I'm never quite sure if it is loading something.

I'm curious why the free DLC is being released as free DLC, rather than just patch content. Does the concept of free DLC provide more publicity?

From what I've seen thus far it's being fairly well received -- certainly enough to warrant further expansions and sequels.

Higher level powers (10+); transcendant souls (become a divine creature of some sort); unique magical forms (necromancy; crystalmancy; shadowmancy, &c.); more potent enemies; new environments; different strongholds for different PC classes; magical ammunition; sandbox environments; flying/swimming/underwater action; modding toolset.

How about a quest to provide an animated form for the intelligent weapon, then make her a full companion?