dunehunter

In PoE 1, a rogue can do like 80+ damage per swing in late game with gears. But now in PoE 2 u can do even more damage with, for example, a Helwalker/Soul Blade. And you have only access to exceptional gears. And this is only at level 7-9. If you have got higher level abilities, for example Deathblow, your damage gonna rocket higher.

Yeah could be a typo. Here's a pic of the description: The tooltip is confusing right now, +200 crit damage actually means +100 crit damage.

Let's make some summary on the issues of casters so far, shall we? Cast time still need some adjustment, at least most of us agree 6 second casting time is not fun at all, not to mention 9 second for spells. CC are not as strong as they are in PoE1, the main reason is the change of afflictions. The main victim of this change is casters like wizard, cipher and druid. Might model currently benefit more to meleer than casters. As a suggestion to fix this issue, MaxQuest has a good suggestion linked here https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/94949-should-might-stay-multiplicative-or-return-to-additive/page-4?do=findComment&comment=1964087 Lack of accuracy and penetration booster. A 'Empower' modal that trade cast time to power level might be able to help solve this issue. Crit damage nerfed from 50% to 25%, since caster already lack damage additive bonus, this change hurt casters more than meleer. Bring melee back to a reasonable power level, like dual wielding being superior to other style. Here is a good example shows that the weapon system is unbalanced. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/95289-weapon-balance-and-comparison/

Upload the saves, every time the caster use the spell the game either crash or gives a red warning information in combat log as below Sage (Tikawara) (e9d3f251-5f73-4826-a597-16360581b98f) (754590062).zip

As topic, it seems to does 0 damage to any enemy with armor rate. Only enemy with 0 armor rate takes damage now.

Yeah I think it is the same issue as here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/95273-spiritual-weapon-hitting-for-over-1000-damage/

Turn Wounding Shot into a Full Attack is a bad idea in general. It does more harm to range weapon than benefit. Previously when I'm dual wielding Pistol, I can use two Wounding Shot on two target without waiting. Now I cannot do that anymore because ut becomes a full attack that force me to waste my offhand bullet. Wounding Lash doesn't get benefit from Full Attack, Only duration stacks but it make no difference when your two attack happen at same time. So I hope the devs can change it back to Primary Attack please.

Yeah I wonder how that 450 damage comes from, I tried myself but cannot do even close damage :/

Holy ** 450 damage just from a standard FoD? This is pretty OP

Making caster time faster will mess up the new interruption system I think. If they turn back to PoE 1 cast time, then all weapon need to roll back to old system that has an inner interrupt value, also all abilities causing interruptions need rework. I think it’s too much work for the team. So can we keep cast time slow and remove all recover time for spells? This change will reduce the casting cycle for a lot Spell by half. I know this will favor heavy armor casters, but it’s easier to fix. For example, make armor penalty affect both cast time and recovery time. Recovery time for swinging a sword make sense to me because one need to regain balance after swinging weapon. For spells, I never understand why they also have recovery time.

My dual wielding Wizard/Monk with Minor Blights + Lightening Strike is acting like he is throwing fireball with his auto attacks, doing 60+ aoe damage, but with 0.4 ‘cast time’ and 1.5 recovery time

Thanks for the answer that makes a lot sense. But if weapon quality is unique multiplier, this will make low quality weapon much less appealing to users than PoE 1. Specially the enchantment system is reworked now, if we cannot upgrade any weapon to lendary, then they will be useless in high level according to v4 solution.

Just remind me of ‘I need a bigger sword’ from Misc when target immune to his damage. I think informative ‘bark’ does help players!

@MaxQuest, I just turned back and look at your v4 solution again, I like it a lot and I have a question, if you make weapon quality a separate multiplier, would that make it unfair for caster because spells doesn’t benefi from weapon quality? So maybe power level can be treated as caster’s ‘weapon quality’ and be used as a multiplier too? In this way, devs can design magic weapon for casters to balance meleer, like a wand that grant caster +1 power level to spells (roughly = fine weapon), +2 power level = exceptional weapon and so on.

Yeah anyway you get my point here Let Might be separate multiplier will just make gap between melee and caster bigger, simply because melee has more bonus to damage.

I think u didn’t read his suggestion carefully. In the version 4 he suggested, Might is working as an additive with bonus like soul whip and sneak attack. Not a separate multiplier.

There are melee and ranged conjured weapons, but devoted should only pick melee weapon as their weapon proficiency, it is countering their setting. You either have to separate conjured weapon into range and melee two proficiency or make devoted to be able to choose range weapon for their proficiency. I don't think either will make any sense.

Another reason Casters feel underwhelming to Melee is because now Str/Res is now a multiplier instead of an additive. This change has little benefit to casters because spells don't have other additive bonus like melee (melee has a lot additive bonus like sneak attack, soul whip, weapon enhancement and etc), the only additive bonus spell has is crit damage bonus and that is nerfed from 50% to 25% too. So imagine a spell that does 100 damage will do 130 damage with 20 Might, the benefit he got from Might is 30 damage no matter if it's a multiplier or additive. A rogue/cipher who does 100 basic damage, will do 100 * (1 + 0.5 + 0.4) = 190 damage and 220 damage if Might is an additive, but will do 247 damage if it is a multiplier, so he gets 57 damage bonus from 30 MIght now. And the more additive he stacks, the further he leaves a caster behind. And I haven't include Lash here, a meleer with Lash will get even more gain from Might than caster, but you get my idea. Thus melee feels much stronger than spells, plus the cast time is very slow now. Therefore we will feel casters are slow, weak and not fun to play. Even if we give spells higher basic damage, I don't think this will solve the problem because a min-max player will still try to stack as many additive bonus on melee to get the maximum gain from high Might, spell damage will still be far behind melee. To solve this problem eventually, I really hope they can revert the change of Might and go back to PoE 1 additive style, and I don't believe it will cause more trouble than it has now.

That... would make sense. To be honest “second wind” seems like the best sustain ability, with high level athletics giving you pretty much second life in combat. Considering I found It almost mandatory for everyone to have at least a bit invested in athletics (even west level second wind can mean a difference between surviving and being knocked out) giving everyone second wind and scaling it based on constitution seems like a solid idea to me. Second Wind is a healing power everyone can access to, problem of Second Wind is same to the problem of healing. If there are too much healing in the game, Con will be less useful.

I think it really depends on how much u nerf other defense factors, if they are nerfed too much, then Con would become a penality to not invest. But slight nerf will make Con more important but not a must stats. It’s just another solution devs can explore to make Con better. Without moving one bonus from a stats to another. For example you see that by split Might’s bonus into Str and Res, it causes a lot issue and disagreements among us. But for Con, boosting health seems to be a solution that solve issues from root, instead of fixing things on surface. If someone can make a formula on total damage/hit one can get before die to health/healing/defense/armor rate. I’m pretty sure the health pool/Con only take a small part in that formula. If we can make the factor bigger, of course Con will become more attractive then it is now.

While all of us are thinking a way to give Con more bonus. I’m trying to think it in another way. So we all know that Con = health now. When we complain/discuss Con’s usefulness, we are actually talking about the usefulness of health. As Neocomando mentioned, on defense side there are multipliers as health * deflection * armor. And health can be divided into the health pool we have at the beginning of combat and heals we recieved. All the earlier discussion is about how to give Con ‘more’. While I’m asking, can we make health more important? By saying make health more important I actually means, to nerf the efficiency of the rest 3 factor. So If we make deflection, armor and healing less effective, health/Con becomes more essential . Then to make a sturdier character, we have to raise Con. Thus the Con problem is solved.

If someone would tell me before beta that I would have a party of auto-fod-attacking paladins, and have not 2, not 1, but 0 ciphers in my party, I wouldn't believe him Btw can u stack Eternal Flame and Shared Flame if u have two Pals in party?

One idea comes through my mind for Con, can we make Con to reduce recovery time penalty for armors, similar to Armored Grace, so high Con character will benefit more from wearing heavy armors. Because if an attribute only functions as an offense or defense stats, then it’s unavoidable for it to be a dump stats for certain build (tank dump dex, dps dump Con). So if we mix every stats with both offense/defense side, it becomes hard to dump any. And the only offensive side of Con that make sense to me is reduced armor penalty. So high Con character can wear heavy armor and attack faster than low Con character. Specially now u can build a 3 Con character with super heavy armor and keeps healing yourself, I think u will be more tanky than any high Con low armor characters. Make Con ties to armor can solve this issue partially imo.

Voted, I suggested in a similar thread that Con should get something like bonus to healing. Actually It’s just recently that I realize all Str, Dex, Per and even INT has multipletive effect on offensive side. However for defensive side there only Res and Con. And sadly Con has a diminishing effect on survival depends on how much heal power you received, the more healing u get, the less effective Con is. I think it makes total sense to give healing bonus to Con, and give buff/debuff duration bonus/resistance to Res.

Little known fact: PoE2 is way more vancian than PoE1. In fact it is more vancian than typical vancian system (think D&D). First, let's look at the problem vancian casting brings: "Caster has prepared wrong spell" (and not the right one). Is it a problem in PoE1? In case of druid and priests answer is obvious, in case of wizards - less so but it's still a "No". At worst a wizard will spent like 1.5s switching a grimoire, big deal. In D&D preparing spells requires a rest so it can not be done in combat. Now this is something players can have problem with. In PoE2 casters are choosing spells not per rest but per life!! Sure, wizards still have their grimoires but other caster AFAIK have no such options and are stuck with their choice forever. It would be really disappointing that if I found a Lendary gromire but found out that I have already picked half of the spells it has during my level up. Then either the gromire is wasted or I have to respec repeatedly to max the spells I can use.