dunehunter

As topic, spell cannot be used on aggro targets.

Finally figured out why Minoletta's Minor Missile is so powerful after empowered. First let's see the spell description below: The Jump target get 20% damage bonus from the original damage. So when Empowered, you got extra projection and jumps, each time your missile jumped, the damage is multiplied by 1.2, so if your missile jumps 5 times, the damage multiplier becomes 1.2 ^ 5 = 2.5, not to mention you get more projections that further increase the damage... Not sure if the jump target got damage bonus is intended or not, but with empower it really feels very powerful. I think there might be a bug that jump target has more damage than the original target tho And I suspect that for the Bounding Missile, all basic damage, projection number, jump number is empowered, which I think is not intended, way too powerful. This is the spell description of Jolting Touch, and we can see how it works when empowered, much less powerful when it is empowered...

I think Mark for the hunt should not grant you accuracy bonus and currently there is a bug here? At least it didnt give you accuracy bonus in the previous patch or game.

I have tried to visualize your suggestion: Still thinking what conclusion to make, but can already see that the increase in damage from extra PEN is really high. And if we take a lower coefficient, our frontliners will struggle with damage mitigation. Maybe the easiest way to fix frontline damage mitigation is, using different Coefficient for damage reduction and damage multiplier.

Maybe a Sharpshooter/Devoted

I hope at least I can make a ranged Devoted

Totally agreed, Empower and these long cast spells will definitely be a newbie traps, as for a player who has few experiences in game, he can pick a lot ‘wrong’ spells, or use Empower on something useless (like u mentioned, Sworn enemy). I do wish they can make Empower work on every ability and spell and do enhance them, instead of 0 effects.

I list a few Spell that is insane when empowered: Minoletta’s Bounding Missile + Empower = super powerful AOE damage, Concussive’s Missile is not as strong as Bounding Missile for damage aspect; Fireball + Empower + Assassinate = 200+ damage if crits in a large area. Relentless Storm + Empower = every enemy in the area get strike by empowered stun lightning, with bonus accuracy. I only listed a few, and I’m expecting to see other spells that I didn’t discover!

Well I never say the current stats of caster is OK, as I summarized in earlier post that there are a lot problems and I do agree cast time is too long, same as SaruNi, I’m just trying to figure out if there are any playable caster build in current beta. Finished my play-through in PoTD. For the previous post saying combat ends in 10 second, I wonder were u play in classic or veteran mode? Maybe because I’m not rolling 5 Berserker/Paladin, and I only used 4 characters in my party. The combat feels pretty long for me, I feel a lot of them ends more than 30 seconds, and my wizard can spam all spells and did pretty good damage. My nature godlike evoker maxing Dex, Res and Per did 10k damage in record, same as my main who is a Goldpact/Shifter. And I feel the bigger the combat is, the more useful wizard is. The empowered blast can really have devastating effect and change battles. But that is the only caster build that worked functionally now sadly. Other casters still feels weak and I just try to avoid long cast time spells in my builds. The worst caster now is Cipher, not only because the Str Res split make them bad on both melee and spells, but their low damage and long cast time make it impossible to spam spells like wizard does (if u avoid 6 second cast time spells for wizard it is playable). Priest are bugged right now so I didn’t play them much. Fury is horrible compare to Evoker in damage, Druid blast spells just need some uptune compare to wizard’s. The only good spell I find is Relentless Storm, an empowered Relentless storm is dominating. But only one good spell cannot change druid’s awkward status as caster I feel. Chanters are amazing if you avoid summon spells. I like Troubadour a lot as u can make it into a buffer, or use the Recite modal and spam CC or blast. I had a good time with my Rogue/Troubadour.

Yeah an Assassin/Evoker can do over 200 damage with an assassinate empowered fireball while a normal wizard might do around 30,40 damage with the same spell.

Well, the big flaw with that is that it eliminates specialization. Bleakwalker specializes towards damage, and in doing so gives up... damage. Kind Wayfarer specializes towards healing at the cost of... healing. There's a problem with Paladins (in the point of view of devs) that the maluses were out of place because there is no base Paladin class. In other words, your only option is to specialize, and there's no option to be a generalist. How true that is is debatable, according to other forumites. But suggesting that every bonus come with a malus that affects the same exact thing is making it so that none of the options are specializing; they're all equally as viable at doing all the same jobs. They're all base class paladins, but with a different shade of devotion. In which case, what's the point of having subclasses? Thinking about it, getting rid of maluses might have been a good move for Paladins, but the way it was done didn't change the playstyle of the subclass. Instead of boosting the base Paladin abilities, they could've given them an extra one that comes with a malus. Something like Gold Pact get their bonus to armor when using their special Sworn Enemy, but can't have auras active when doing so. Shieldbearers get extra engagements and deflection bonus on Lay on Hands when using large shields, but can't cast lay on hands on themselves while equipped. Bleakwalkers get their special Flames of Devotion along with the option of the regular version, but if used, their healing given and received drops while the afflictions last. Situational maluses that are active only when bonuses are active. You can choose to be a specialist within your Paladin order, but otherwise you can choose to be a generalist Paladin. The situational malus sounds a fair trade to me. What about Darcozzi tho I really like the PoE 1 Darcozzi Observer build, but in Deadfire they only have gimped flame shield and a weird malus.

Same as some eq bonus, icon stack by itself every save/load will stack an icon there.

As screenshot below.

Yeah that works too, up green arrow means we are under inspiration, down red arrow means under affliction. But anyway they should be separate from other buff because now every equipment’s bonus, rest bonus, weapon modal and a lot more will show in your portrait’s right panel so there will be a lot buff/debuff there in battle. It is a messy to look there search for the info I want.

Valid point. What's the level of broodmother suggested by Joe? It's around 9? Had played it, yes. Generally each point of Armor was providing an extra 6% to EHP vs physical damage (which was changed to 5% when 7.07 kicked-in). The thing is, it won't work that well in Deadfire, because: - it would render penetration weapons as completely subpar. - we would be taking quite a lot of damage even if our AR is much higher than enemy PEN. For example at AR-PEN = 9: damage going through = 1 - (0.05 * 9)/(1 + 0.05 * 9) = 68.9% We can simply change the coefficient 0.05 to the original formula, the old one is DR = (0.05 * armor)/(1 + 0.05 * armor), if we change the 0.05 to maybe 0.5 or 1 for example, even 1 armor advantage will be obvious. And this coefficient is easier to adjust. And I think they should make the number bigger, now every point of armor or penetration has a huge impact on battle, if number is bigger, there is more space to adjust things. For example now shield mastery from unbroken only provide 1AR, while Paladin aura provide 1 AR too, but for the whole team, there are surely some balance issue here. And it is awkward for them to do further adjustment because each point of bonus has huge advantage now.

As topic!

This is a Warcraft 3's armor system DotA stole. Give credit where it's due, please. The problem with % armor reduction (one of them) is that low values do too little and high values do too much. How much reduction do i have with 1 armor? 2%? This is nothing. With 80 armor i have over 80% reduction. Even strongest attacks will become meh. And in case they are so strong they still threaten me they will completely obliterate anyone with 50% damage reduction. As I said, we shall give the PoE 2 modal a steeper curve than War 3 modal, so 1 armor advantage still can have some significant damage reduction. The Dota/War 3 system is an example to smooth the armor vs damage reduction.

This bug still exists, at least in Fighter/Paladin multi-classes.

Kind Wayfarers are never a weak subclass. For power aspect in current beta, I will rank Goldpact > Bleak walker = Kind wayfarers > Darcozzi > Shieldbearer. Shield Bearers would probably be the best to present as a base class then and restore the malus to every other class. Also I feel Shield Bearer should be able to heal themselves. (They'd want to continue holding the threat at bay themselves rather than retreat and heal the injured) Some original penalty is really horrible tho, the -30% heal/heal received means NO to Second wind, No to LoH on self. And -15% damage to target vulnerable to sneak attack sounds weird too. I'm ok with penalty, but some of them is just disencourage me to play them.

Kind Wayfarers are never a weak subclass. For power aspect in current beta, I will rank Goldpact > Bleak walker = Kind wayfarers > Darcozzi > Shieldbearer.

In ability section...

Here is the Armor rate versus Damage multiplier in Dota/Dota 2, and I think this is agreed/tested to be reasonable for a good armor system. In Dota 2, when target's armor rating is 0, damage multiplier is 1 means any damage will have 100% potential and do full damage. Any positive armor rating will gives damage reduction but in a diminishing way. In PoE 2, enemy's Armor rate - your Penetration is their net armor advantage/disadvantage against you, so AR - Pen in PoE2 is similar to Armor rating in Dota. If we make the (AR - Pen) vs damage multiplier in PoE 2 has a similar function as it is in Dota 2 (a steeper curve of course because u cannot have 20,30 AR higher than Pen in PoE 2 so a steeper curve to make small AR advantage worthy), then it can solve a lot issue we have now. And if it follows certain formula, it is easier to adjust or modded by players than it is now. Currently it is a Yes or No to me, if enemy AR is higher than my Pen, sorry it is a NO and I cannot do damage, if my Pen is higher I do full damage, this is a overworked system. If they can make the system works like the curve above, I believe AR can still be useful but not outshine other defense stats like it is now.

In my playthrough, I have a feeling that it is hard to know what kind of affliction my characters have for several reasons. 1) The right panel of my character is always full of a lot of buff/debuff which make it harder to know what affliction I have. 2) You need to move the mouse over to search for afflictions there, so it costs you one more step to know what affliction you have. 3) Some of the affliction is hard to be noticed, for example Weakened, Dazed. There are a lot times when my character has Weakened debuff and I wasted Second Wind and heal 0 hp because I didn't notice the affliction, because there are no visual effect on my character. It is just too hard to know exactly what debuff my characters have and there are 5 of them in the team. Thus I wish we can have a clear way to show Inspiration/Affliction (only these two and left the other buff from eq or ability/spell in right panel) like the pic below. We can use Red icon to present Afflictions, Green icon to present Inspiration and use different icon to categorize them, like Fist for Strength Affliction/Inspiration, Body for Con, Foot for Dex, Eye for Per, Brain for Int and Heart for Res. In this way it is much clearer to check if my character is under affliction or not. For example, if there is a Red Body icon on my portrait, I know my character is under Con Affliction so I need to be careful not to use heal on him before remove the affliction.

No, all the scrolls have short casting times. And you can get not only 4th but 5th level scrolls of Wizard (Torrent of Flames, Form of the Hapless Beast), Priest (Revival), and Druid scrolls (Embrace of the Death Talon). (Scroll of Pull of Eora has 1.6 second cast time and 1 second recovery.) So if you want to experiment with what casters would be like with short casting times you could just console in as many scrolls as you want (set a macro to automate it). Or use that mod that lets you buy any item in the game and buy them in bulk. (Actually it would be much easier to just set your dexterity to give you +50 or +70% action speed.) (Also bear in mind that we'll be able to craft scrolls, so we might end up having an unlimited supply, at least of some scrolls.) What’s the difference between a wizard fireball and a scroll fireball, do they have different power level and what is the gap?

Now you just need to make sure your deflection is high enough to prevent enemy from make a critical score, aka same as their accuracy, then in most case you are safe because the high AR can provide enough protection against all kind of mobs, dragon or kobold, doesn’t matter. Increase further deflection is not that worthy than put the extra attributes point into other stats.