Epsilon Rose

This seems to be a recurring problem in PoE. Ability descriptions either have bad information or lack important information. For example, ciphers don't seem to tell you how much focus you can hold at any given time and the druid's elemental damage abilities don't tell you what their damage actually applies to.

I don't think that will work, since acuracy and deflection are also tied to level and a low level character won't be able to hit or dodge end-game enemies.

Agree. I Hit level cap in mid of 3th act. I haven't beaten the game yet, so how many acts are there?

Two other possibilities: D) Give us something else to spend XP on, beyond levels. Either let us use it to upgrade individual abilities, or invest it in items to either either upgrade them or give them enchantments without spending the full material cost, or let us use them to make/charge consumables. This would allow players to still benifit from XP without increasing their overall level. However, this would, at best, only slow power gain (with the exception of making consumables, which has it's own problems), so It might not be an ideal solution. E) Make quests have behind the scenes consequences and/or make the passage of time matter. That way, if you rush the final boss, you'll be lower level, but he'll be weaker and less prepared. Converely, if you spend a lot of time getting to max level, he'll have bunch of adds and buffs and the dungeon to get to him will be tougher.

The game is not designed to be spread over 20 levels. The framework for those levels, monsters, and encounters are there, but never even in my longest campaigns have I ever gone from level 1-20. If you want to argue that's poor design, that's fine, but that's a difference of opinion. I see it as just another playground. I'm sure there's plenty of people who have fun with their all wizard duels at levels 15-20, but I'm fine in my 3-10 sandbox. That's offering a variety of experience and catering to different crowds. I feel like that's good game design. If you're basing whether it's good design or not based on the highest of levels with the most broken of strategies, then we simply don't look at DnD the same way. For me, DnD is a framework that my friends and I can play pretend with. It is NOT a game to be beaten. If that doesn't convince you of anything, then let's simply agree to disagree. Now you say that wizards are problematic based on their per day spell casting system. What do you think about every other class? Druids use the same system, but they do far more damage than a wizard can pull out early game, and I would argue are more useful all game. Not to mention they are unstoppably strong in the early levels with their spiritshift, and naturally higher survivalability. Ciphers can cast repeatedly and are resource based. Is that better designed? Personally I find ciphers too strong. Druids and clerics can access their entire spell repetoir while the wizard is limited to 4 spells per level AND he needs to find access to these spells. Shouldn't a wizard's limited palette mean he should have stronger tools? Again, even if you're games don't cover the entire spectrum of rules, when discussing the design of the game you need to take that entire spectrum into acount. Wizards break things at higher levels. This is bad design. Some groups fix this by simply ommiting everything above level 6 (this is a varriant called E6), while others try to fix the wizard itself. Either way, some form of fix is required, because there is something flawed with the original material. Druid and Cleric are also problematic for the same reasons. Ciphers represent a much better system. Their current ability set might be too strong, but it's much easier to predict what they'll be able to do in any given fight (they can't, for example, burn a whole days worth of resources in a single fight) and they'll always be able to use their powers, so they should be much easier to balance properly. A wizard's limited pallate looks limiting, but it really isn't. Since a wizard can buy access to any of the spells they want, the fact that they don't start with all the spells is less relevant than how many good spells exist on each list. Similarly, Having to have spells stored in a spellbook is limiting, but you can simply carry multiple spellbooks and switch between them on the fly (not that you're likely to need more than 4 different spells of each level for any given situation). It is worth noting that this is more of a limitation in PoE, where classes don't need to prepare spells in advance and the selection of spells is much more limited, but it's still not much of a factor.

It isn't really that chanters are weak, so much as the way their mechanics come together is somewhat boring and ill-suited to progression.

I don't think it was a problem in dark souls and even if you can hit max level in many RPGs, it normally happens much closer to the final boss.

Wizards can indeed escape from fights at their leisure, but the campaign should have some fights that you CAN get away from, but shouldn't. If your party is on the defense, such as defending a town from a bandit raid, then escaping means failing your objective. Same for assaulting a location in order to kill/rescue a certain person or to obtain a certain object. Escaping from one of those means your objective will likely not be there when you return. I would say what I said about them being fun IS relevant to how well its designed. Some people DO like wizards how they are, and DnD isn't a competitive game, so I see no harm in them being unbalanced. My experience with DnD is improved with wizards simply existing, so I believe them to be well designed. Is there any reason I shouldn't think of it that way? Wizards don't need to be underpowered in this game because they're based on DnD wizards. Your main problem seems to be their ridiculous spells that simply bypass mechanics completely, but this game doesn't need to have those. Wizards in PoE are just simply filled with too much junk spells. Almost every buff spell is unusably bad either by undertuning or just bad design. Plenty of damage spells are horribly undertuned as well. Wizards have the traditional fantastically bad early game without the carrot on a stick that is their usual higher level repetoir. This is especially noticable by everyone because the first companion you get is a wizard with one usuable spell. I'm convinced at this point that wizards are just bad druids. First, the game is designed to be spread over 20 levels. If it doesn't work over 10 of those, it is poorly designed, regardless of whether or not you, personally, like to play at those levels. The game comes with a list of spells, if you have to gut that list to make it balanced, the list was poorly designed. That you can choose to not play at certain levels or with certain aspects of a game does not reflect on it's balance, it reflects on the patch job you can do after the fact. Also, quick notes: There may or may not be SoDs at low level, without cheese, but there are Save or Suck spells that will do just as good of a job at invalidating encounters. Also, I don't have these problems with my group, but we don't play D&D either: it's a rather poorly designed game. You're thinking too narrowly about a wizard's capabilities as well. They don't need to escape from fights, they can just use a nightmare to astral project into the material plane to fight with impunity. Look up some of the discussions on breaking wizards, I don't think you have a good grasp on just what the class is capable of. How fun a game is to play with your group of friends isn't relevant when discussing how well designed the game is, because you aren't actually discussing the game: you're discussing your friends. Nearly any game can be fun to play with a good group. If you use that as your standard, you'll never be able to say anything meaningful about game design, because you won't even be talking about it. Tell me what 3.5 and it's wizards let your group do that a more balanced system or a system that's more focused on wizardry, rather than trying to balance it with more restricted mundane combat, can't do better. Where do the mechanics stop being a hindrance and start helping? I never said wizards need to be underpowerd, but the chassis they're using is poorly designed and it will continue to cause problems. Spells that are balanced per day, by necessity, need to be stronger than abilities that are balanced per encounter. However, there's no real way to predict how those spells will be spent, so if a player can hold off using them, they'll just curbstop any relevant fights by dumping a full days worth of power into them. At the same time, because a wizard has all these really powerful abilities, they don't have any other powers; so they're really boring to play when you're not using your crazy powers. The fact that resting is basically unlimited and at will in PoE just exacerbates this. One of the things devs can try to do to limit this is reduce the power and/or the scope of the spells wizards have available, but this tends to result in the truck loads of useless spells you commented on. In this game, you can't act on a per day scale, so abilities shouldn't be balanced on that scale, but that's exactly what the wizard is trying too do and there is no good reason for it.

Are you beggining by declaring the upper half of the game unplayable because of wizard scaling? That really doesn't help your argument. Neither do appeals to enough fights. Wizards have spells that let them control how many fights they get into, assuming they're even bothering to attack from the same plain of existence. Also, Fire ball is one of their more balanced spells, it is not the problem. The problem is there SoDs and SoSs, because they don't need to play the damage game. Your second paragraph has nothing to do with the mechanics of the game. It's completely irrelevant to how well the class is designed. The wizard in D&D being terribly designed doesn't mean that the wizard in this game has to be to, but if you base the wizard in this game on that wizard it's going to be, because you're basing it on something that's poorly designed.

I'm just going to assume you're trolling. I don't really see what's wrong with wizards. They're a pretty cool class, and I enjoy seeing the silly hijinks my more creative friends get into. I'm just going to assume you're trolling. I don't really see what's wrong with wizards. They're a pretty cool class, and I enjoy seeing the silly hijinks my more creative friends get into. They are a class whose theme is MAGIC! and MAGIC! is do all the things. Of course that is powerful. But being ridiculously powerful is not great design. Any 13 year old can make an overpoweringly awesome class. The spellcaster anwser whenever a non spellcaster gains a class feature: "I have a spell for that" What they said. More specifically, Wizards are built on a completely different paradigm than mundane classes and they're really good at using that paradigm, so they break the game. Here's a sample of some of the problems they cause: A well built wizard can fill the role of any class better than that class, with the possible exceptions of druids and clerics who are on the same tier. A wizard can completely change their powers every day. Mundane characters deal with enemies by doing HP damage, which has no effect until you get them down to 0. Wizards have save or [die/suck/lose] and even no save, just die spells that cause horific consequences immediatly. Mundane characters need to use a full round to use their full abilities and have little use for swifts. Wizards can use their full abilities with swifts and standards. Wizards can dictate the terms of the game and generally make themselves incuvulnerable. Wizards can remove their own weaknesses through tricks like rope-trick. Wizards only need 1 stat to do all of this. If, by some miracle, you manage to sperate a wizard from their spells, the class has litterally no other features. This is espesially problematic at low levels where they atleast pretend to be balanced.

Does your armor effect your defense once you shift? Also, are shifts supposed to last for the whole battle or until dismissed?

You'd probably be better off giving them more per encounter or at will abilities, rather than trying to balance more spells per day, since per day resources can be novaed or hoarded and it's hard to predict which will happen when designing encounters. Nope. Can I ask what this 'Legend' you speak of is? It's a free PnP rpg that was based on, and designed to fix, most of 3.x's flaws and, in my opinion, did a fairly good job of it. At least, it did a much better job than PoE. Their main site is here, but you can find the most recent version here. I'm just going to assume you're trolling.

Personally, I think it might be interesting if you could spend extra XP on things other than levels. Maybe you could dump it into items to offset the cost of upgrading them or into an individual ability to make it more powreful. Then again, I'm finding the leveling system they implemented fairly lack luster.

The lead designer of PoE does not like Wizards. They represent everything wrong about class design (according to his opinion). Right now even my fighter/tank is using more abilities per combat then my PC Wizard on auto-attack...Its really ironic... To be fair. D&D wizards do represent many, many, things wrong with class design... Actually, that's true of most of the classes in the core book. It's too bad he did litterally nothing to fix those problems and just exacerbated them.

Out of curiosity, arcane veil seems to be a 2 per rest 10-20 second buff. That seems really weak, espesially for a tallent. Am I missing something?

I like the way Legend handles buffs. They use a per scene (or in this case, pre rest) resource and most last for the whole scene (period between rests).

Do wildstrike or Marksman effect spells?

Ok. Would you recomend any of the spiritshifts over another? Currently, I'm thinking either Wolf for the knockdown>Disengage, Stag for the aoe melee incase I can't disengage, or Cat if it's attack speed buff effects spells. Also, any suggestions on race? Right now I'm leaning Elf or Orlan. Unfortuantely, Elf doesn't really buff the atributes I'd want to pump.

I'm 80% sure this isn't true.

This is becoming an annoying trend. I feel the complete opposite way. As much as I like the game I hate the damage type and DR systems. All it does is force me to gauge the enemy's DRs and switch to the weapon that does the highest DPS to it, which is just a chore. If weapons just had a few niches (probably high-interrupt [two-weapon], high defense [shield], high damage [two-handed]) and otherwise were just aesthetic choices I'd be much, much happier. The other matter is how incredibly annoying flat DR is. I've tinkered with some RPG systems of my own in the past and found that, just like the video game Gothic demonstrates, that a system of flat DR is incredibly difficult to balance well. You touched on PoE's big problem earlier in your post: heavy armor is too common, which means the high damage-per-hit weapons are the clear choices (long live the Estoc/Poleaxe combo!). Of course if heavy armor was too rare then dual-wielding would be the obvious choice, but that wouldn't be so bad since the toughest fights tend to have more DR so who would kit themselves out based on how to handle the easy fights? Armor should just be a simple increase to deflection. It's much simpler and doesn't bias the game towards one weapon type or another. I do agree that flat DR is incredebly difficult to balance. In fact in real life they didn't manage to balance it at all. They raced towards heavier armor and weapons, leaving lighter ones in the past..until they found the weapon that penetrates all armor they could conceivably wear. After that they stopped wearing armor, as it was almost pointless or even worse than not wearing it. This gives the unbalance in PoE an extra immersive dimension. I don't care about the "balance" or weapons in the game because that concept is moot in a 'single-player. I don't like character creation traps, but I really detest the idea of killing the well-functioning single-player mechanics just because some people can't cope with their pre-conceptions being broken. I can't believe I have to keep saying this, but that is not how balance works. You want a balanced game, believe me you do, because an unbalanced game is a broken game that will, at best, quickly grow stale. Go turn on the cheat console and do a run where you start at level 12 with 24s in all of your stats and you'll see what I mean. There is a difference between balanced and everything being the same or even on the same level. Sir, this thread starts with a complaint that one weapon is better than the others, and that it unbalances the game with the 5 extra points of damage it does against monsters who doesen't have extra protection against piercing attacks. I think it's safe to say you're missing the mark by a fair bit there. No, the thread started by saying one type of weapon is always better than the others because the condition for it to be better is always true. In a game that's all about building different characters, if one choice is always clearly superior in a category of weapons, then that is broken and you might as well not have a choice in the first place.

I feel the complete opposite way. As much as I like the game I hate the damage type and DR systems. All it does is force me to gauge the enemy's DRs and switch to the weapon that does the highest DPS to it, which is just a chore. If weapons just had a few niches (probably high-interrupt [two-weapon], high defense [shield], high damage [two-handed]) and otherwise were just aesthetic choices I'd be much, much happier. The other matter is how incredibly annoying flat DR is. I've tinkered with some RPG systems of my own in the past and found that, just like the video game Gothic demonstrates, that a system of flat DR is incredibly difficult to balance well. You touched on PoE's big problem earlier in your post: heavy armor is too common, which means the high damage-per-hit weapons are the clear choices (long live the Estoc/Poleaxe combo!). Of course if heavy armor was too rare then dual-wielding would be the obvious choice, but that wouldn't be so bad since the toughest fights tend to have more DR so who would kit themselves out based on how to handle the easy fights? Armor should just be a simple increase to deflection. It's much simpler and doesn't bias the game towards one weapon type or another. I do agree that flat DR is incredebly difficult to balance. In fact in real life they didn't manage to balance it at all. They raced towards heavier armor and weapons, leaving lighter ones in the past..until they found the weapon that penetrates all armor they could conceivably wear. After that they stopped wearing armor, as it was almost pointless or even worse than not wearing it. This gives the unbalance in PoE an extra immersive dimension. I don't care about the "balance" or weapons in the game because that concept is moot in a 'single-player. I don't like character creation traps, but I really detest the idea of killing the well-functioning single-player mechanics just because some people can't cope with their pre-conceptions being broken. I can't believe I have to keep saying this, but that is not how balance works. You want a balanced game, believe me you do, because an unbalanced game is a broken game that will, at best, quickly grow stale. Go turn on the cheat console and do a run where you start at level 12 with 24s in all of your stats and you'll see what I mean. There is a difference between balanced and everything being the same or even on the same level.

What difficulty was this?

Wait, really? Was there a vote on that that I missed, because I would absolutely have been against per rest spells. They're terribad for balancing and gameplay. There was no vote, but when Josh explained his idea for wizards lots of people were quite angry that it was MMO like cooldown system that don't have anything to do with IE games, which lead that they changed their plans and created more Vancian style system for wizards. Both of those systems sound disappointing. Why not just give them a large array of per encounter abilities or a small selection of at will abilities that can be built from a larger selection of parts and limit when they can do the rebuilds.

Wait, really? Was there a vote on that that I missed, because I would absolutely have been against per rest spells. They're terribad for balancing and gameplay.

Really? That's actually a bit irritating, because the hearth's description makes it sound fairly important. There's too much in this game that's opaque or poorly telegraphed to the player.