dunehunter

You know that the overpenetration bonus is an addtive right? So if you are a rogue doing sneak attack with an exceptional weapon, you actually don't get +30% damage, but something like +10% from overpenetration. So with the low base damage of high penetration weapon, it becomes totally meaningless to use them. If they don't change overpenetraion bonus to a seperate multiplier bonus, imo there is NO reason to use high pen weapons like war hammer and estoc.

Attacking with silent ranged weapon doesn’t break stealth ?

I asked a couple of times in beta surpport section. If pull push should trigger disengagement or not. The devs’ answer is no as they hate synergy Same as Unbroken/wizard combo. I raised this idea in one post and the Devs nerfed this! Too strong!

Yeah I never argue the risk of interruption because I agree with u. But I don’t agree that when you say 3.7s of two handed is far less than 6 second of fireball for bottleneck problem. And then u said u assume melee recovery is 3 not 4.... I’d compare average cast spell with 2h weapon, fast cast spell with dual wielding and long cast spell with arquebus. So the fact is it is 4s for 1h and 2h now. anyway I’d say the bottleneck for two handed and fireball is not that far as u said at least.

Imo cast time affect different spells differently. We can divide spells into different categories. A. AOE projective spells. Example Fireball, Confusion. B. Linear and cone spell, example the lvl 3 wizard lightning blast. C. Single target spells like all missile spells. D. Self buff like mirror image and summon weapon spells. E. Some other type I’m too lazy to list here I think cast time impact B and D more than A and C, because for B, position is very important. Retarget works good for A and C, not B. For D, their gain is not instant, caster need some time to get its benefits. So the longer the cast time, the shorter the combat time, the worse they are. Therefore my advice is to buff B and D to make them catch up with other spells first.

Sigh I never mix cast time and recover time. Your fireball time is 6s, two handed weapon cast time + recovery time is 0.7 + 4s, I’m assuming your meleer will wear heavier armor than caster here so your two handee will need almost 6 second to swing + recovery too. I don’t know why u say it’s far less here. And it’s make more sense to compare fireball to two handed weapon, dual wielding to the missile spell here IMO. And when I talk about comparisons, I’m saying that your comparison between spells in PoE 1 and deadfire is not accurate because melee recovery and speed calculations formula are also changed. When You say 1h in PoE 1 is 2s and 3.7s in deadfire, u also not take any weapon style into account here. Then u raise weapn style later shrug, I don’t see any point here to be honest. U know with speed buff and dual wielding, it’s very easy to reach 0 recovery in PoE1 right? But with the new speed formula it’s almost impossible to do so. I’d say this is a nerf to melee u not mentioned.

Choices do affect your Faith and Conviction power. I played a Goldpact in beta and picking all stoic choices I get 1 additional defenses.

Devoted/Assassin to trigger cleave with assasinate. Blackjack/Streetfighter, get bloodied in battle and then use fast switch with 3 set of blunderbuss to do crazy burst damage.

Yeah u didn’t count dual wielding bonus in deadfire, but u also didn’t count it in either of your PoE1 and deadfire comparison. And the bottleneck you mentioned is not the problem of spell only. If u wear plate amor and swing two handed weapon, your recovery time is close to 6 second too, and u didn’t mention their bottleneck here. Thirdly I don’t think using titan here is a good example. As I can one shot it with my assassin build, so does it mean every fight last 1 second? Of course no. Titan fight is a case where boss is too weak and there are very few mobs in encounter. And I believe a normal POTD fight can last longer, maybe around 1min.

But my question is shall we balance melee/spell in deadfire into the same level of melee/spell in PoE 1? Specially when casters like wizard/priests are already the best classes in 1.

I think this comparison is not too fair as melee recovery is longer in PoE 2 too. IMO your comparison should be how much slower is spell in DF and how much slower is melee in DF, and compare these two. In another word, only comparing how much the spells get worse has no point to discuss as you didn’t take melee into account. If melee also get slower and weaker, spell should be tuned in same pace. If spells are nerfed more than melee, then there are problems. And you should also take the change for per rest to per encounter into account but I’m not sure how it impact spells, make them stronger or weaker? I’m not so sure here.

Berath/Stalker would be pretty good since you can consider Lash and Wounding as two different multiplier. Berath offers a good summon weapon that gives 50% lash while wounding shot gives 60%+ wounding damage. In summary, 50 lash + 60 wounding > 50 lash + 60 lash.

I remember checking wounding shot + blast in beta 2, wounding doesn’t split to blast targets so no synergy between rod and wounding shot :/

As far as I know u cannot delay any point in beta, talent, proficiency, skill point, all no.

I raised that bg2 like weapon proficiency earlier but get argued for the same reason. If we invest into a weapon three time then nobody will use those weapon that is not proficiented. I think the current system is more newbie friendly for who only play one playthrough. So if they find some cool weapon they want to use, but is not proficiented, they got no penalty for doing that. But for hardcore gamer who will do a lot playthrough, this is quite meaningless as we know what weapon we will use in game in each step of playthrough. For them, a bg2 like system feels more rewarding as we can make us really master some weapon we like.

My PoE spell strategy is: 1. Approach enemy when stealthing. 2. Spamming Shadowflame to enemy not immune to Paralysis or Grease Ground to enemy who immune to Paralysis. 3. Repeat spamming these until enemy dead 4. 1 again or rest when no spells at lvl 4 spells I don’t feel it’s too interesting to play that way either...

Yeah I totally agree that a lot weapon modals are half baked. A lot melee weapon modals are pretty similar to each other, like +Pen -Recovery or etc.

I have no idea for the change, maybe they try to nerf the dual wielding Kind Wayfarer that get two heals with FoD? But this change also make two handed Kind Wayfarer lag behind again.

Bad: 1. benefit over penetration is too low, punishment for no pen is too harsh. It feels too binary and shall be changed to be more linear. And critical attack feels not rewarding enough because over penetration bonus is an additive. 2. Recovery time too long, I’m fine with 3-5sec cast time, but at least reduce recovery time so we don’t idle there watch each other. 3. No generic talents. 4. Might split to Str and Res. On the phone so can’t text a lot.

I think it depends on your difficulty and your build. If playing on POTD or your build is more supportive like Kind Wayfarer/Lifegiver who dump Perception, then the answer is yes you will graze a lot even with FoD accuracy bonus.

I.e. they will increase base focus gain from 0.25 to 0.35 like in PoE1? Can someone explain this? As it rises quite a few questions. They increase PEN of weapons with 5 penetration to 7. They increase PEN of weapons with 7 penetration to 9. What about: - weapons with PEN 9, e.g. estocs? - fist damage? Does this affect non-kith enemies as well? Do I understand it right that it basically buffs weapons in comparison to damaging spells (whose PEN is not affected by this change)? Or the status-quo is kept the same, provided that we take the buffed empower into account? Also does Empower increase the penetration of the spells? And will Empower start affecting abilities like FoD, Barbaric Blow, etc? Empower already affect your abilities like FoD and Barbaric Blow. It gives +20 accuracy +5 Pen and +base damage to your abilities.

A Kind Wayfarer/Soul Blade also makes for a very good character. Paladins bring so much via sworn enemy, LoH, FoD and the on kill effects, while Soul Blade has a very nice damage buff, a penetration buff, a massive raw damage focus dump and the chance to cherry pick a few great powers. You can't go wrong either with the cipher combo or the Eothian priest. Actually paladin/anything is really really good in the beta. Will have to see what high level abilities are lost and see if multiclasses still dominate. I think in beta 3 Sworn Enemy got a big nerf and it is not worth to invest into now. And Kind Wayfarer is also nerfed because the healing effect requires u to hit enemies. Either graze or miss won’t give u heals. Actually both Soul blade and Kind Wayfarer now rely heavily on accuracy as a miss on Soul Annihilation also means lose all focus and gain nothing. For optimization, both subclass should be combined with class like ranger who grant accuracy bonus.

Ah! That’s interesting. I was wondering how people find time to watch their characters wait through recovery, with all the craziness that is happening. In solo runs it makes so much more sense. It reminds me of NWN1. I got stuck in a fight with spider where we couldn’t hit each other, so I went to make some tea while my character was swinging at the enemy occasionally hitting him. They were still swinging when I came back.It looks the same in first BG and both ID. BG 2 is different in that matter because game shows more attack's animations than the characters are doing, just to make combat more flashy and dynamic. PoE is as transparent as BG, ID 1&2 and NWN are - every swing animation is an attempt to hit the target. It can be boring to watch with long recovery (you know it, Barik, even too well) but it's acurate and important from gameplay perspective. In Enhanced Edition all IE games have more swinging animation than actual attacks per round, but it can be turned off in game options. So let’s make more fake swing and block animation in Deadfire to make combat more dynamic?

I’m still not convinced of the expanding class talent approach to make talent more generic. Why not just put all of them into a general pool so everybody can pick them? The latter approach is cleaner and gives more options. Some talents should be given to every class too, like all elemental talent.

Ascendant’s speciality is changed. Now u have around 20 second to cast at +3 power level instead of 5 second.