GordonHalfman

I've noticed that in some cases there is no damage bonus applied from the Rogues Sneak Attack ability even though the Sneak attack text appears in the log and the conditions appear to be satisfied. I've noticed the same thing with the damage from the Merciless companion talent for the ranger. Unfortunately I can't be much more helpful than that, as I think it does work sometimes and I'm not sure what the conditions are. In the image below you see a level 3 ranger companion attacking the Harond Guard on the bridge. If you look in the combat you log at the top line you see the animal companion "Pan" do a normal hit for 9 damage. Then I get the BB Rogue to apply a Blind effect, the next attacks have the Merciless companion text as you would expect but the next normal hit, on the bottom line of the log, only deals 8 damage.

I think Circle of Protection is too much, it obscures selection circles and the marquee selection:

Probably late to the party on this discussion, we haven't discussed the attribute system for a while, but I hope there is still scope for small changes here. This discussion could be relevant for the modding community in any case. Like many I'm finding that the perception stat is essential on many classes, and I wouldn't consider dumping it on any of them except possibly the Priest. I don't know if people agree but I'm also finding the Resolve stat underwhelming. Part of this is down to the general pace of the combat, things are fast and furious right now and I'm finding the base duration of many spells pretty adequate for the job. Priest buffs for example can last long enough for the decisive phase of the combat, and disable spells last long enough to burst someone down etc. So the duration buff is not that great in it's own right, but it's seems particularly weak when compared to the accuracy buff from perception. The reason being that the average duration of most effects increases with your accuracy. Someone might have to correct my maths here, but if we consider a spell of duration X, with an accuracy advantage of (-20, 0, 20) the average duration of the spell will be (0.475, 0.75, 0.95) * X. Now if we consider investing ten stat points in resolve for a 50% increase in duration. The new average duration in the three accuracy regimes listed above will be (0.7125, 1.125, 1.425) * X. Apologies if this is old news but as you can see when the enemy defenses are high you can potentially get better returns from average duration from perception than from resolve. Now this case won't be generally true, however I think it's problematic anyway because from the players perspective I would rather than my effects be applied more reliably even if it means the average duration is smaller. It's also a problem obviously because accuracy is so important for a bunch of things that resolve has no effect on. (I realize I'm underrating resolve by not considering the concentration bonus but the influence of this is a bit hard to gauge so I'll pass over it.) This is particularly true because of the crit resolution system. Increasing your accuracy doesn't just make your actions more reliable it also increases your crit chance, this means high perception characters are not any less "swingy" than low perception characters. Although crits are only a 50% damage bonus in this game in practice it's often more like double the effective damage because of the interaction with DR. I think high incidence of crits in this game contribute to the general feeling of "burstiness", the high general damage and to the fast pace of combat. Crits on spells in particular are also very impactful and can give encounters a sensitive dependence on the resolution of the opening salvo of spells. (This may or may not remind people of the IE games but I don't really care about that side of the debate.) I also think effects that increase the crit range, like Minor Threat and Dirty Fighting are a little strong. Minor Threat in particular seems a lot better than many of the other subrace bonuses. I believe these effects stack with each other and can buff the crit range to the point of being a bit daft. The BB rogue seems to record more crits than hits sometimes. Anyway I have some small suggestions to adjust this: -Just buff resolve a bit, to make it more attractive in it's own right. Even just 6% per point would be a little better. -Modify the crit resolution system so that rather than scaling linearly with positive accuracy advantage the crit chance has a fall off function of some kind. There are probably many options for how to do this, one suggestion would be something like: Crit Chance(%) = 5 + x/(1 + x/20) where x = Acc - Def. This looks like: Obviously this could easily be tweaked to fall off faster or slower. Also with this change stuff like Minor Threat or Merciless Gaze would need to change. Instead of applying an additive bonus to the crit chance make them apply an "effective accuracy advantage" bonus, i.e your crit chance is worked out as if your accuracy advantage is 10 points higher than it actually is, but still subject to the fall off function described above.

Armlet bear was fixed like a year ago. But yeah there's a lot of cool stuff that could be taken from Dota for the Ranger especially, Shackleshot, Gust, Windrun, Entangling Claws, Thirst. I don't find Lone Druid that interesting a hero ability wise, but his itemization is quite cool. Obviously the animal companion can't have items but they could implement temporary buffs for it along the line of Mask of Madness or Blademail. Also they could use the backlash effect or whatever it's called instead of the shared health system, i.e make the Ranger take a bunch of damage when the pet dies and become weakened or prone. Make it so it can only be re-summoned once per day. Perhaps even make it so after being summoned it's combat bonuses are gone and are recovered slowly over several encounters. Although that could be a bit gimmicky and annoying.

A bit about Monk wounds. So, is that already in or will that be introduced in the next patch? I honestly couldn't tell from playing through the beta yesterday. That's also kind of ****ty because that somehow defeats the whole purpose and the most interesting synergies of the class. If there is no incentive to use up wounds immediately and given that some of the more interesting class features are per encounter now anyway, I might as well ignore spending wounds completely and build a monk around all the passive abilities and use the wounds to fuel the turning wheel flame damage. Yes this was my thought exactly, I understand wounds didn't work that well but this change is disappointing.

My mistake re Eldritch Aim. I was sure it said the bonus was only for melee and ranged accuracy. Perhaps it was like that in the last version? Anyway yeah it's a very good spell now. Also I'm probably underrating Arcane Assault, I don't actually find it bad necessarily just a bit boring, although I'm not a fan of per encounter abilities in general. Agreed that a sleep spell would be very nice to have, especially one where enemies wake up when damaged, I like this kind of mechanic from other games. I remember KOTC had a thing where enemies could go and wake up their allies which was pretty cool. I wonder if there's actually any scope for much in the way of new spells and talents before release though, my talent suggestions were mostly for fun but I hope they can add one or two new things. Also something I forgot to mention, I think the Bonus Spell talents are underwhelming. A simple change would be to merge them so there are three talents for levels 1-2, 3-4 and 5-6. I still don't know if I would take them but it's a small buff. Also I had another thought re Alacrity of Motion. As I said I find the stamina loss not very relevant, perhaps the "Deleterious" aspect could be more emphasized by making it amplify incoming damage instead? The spell would still be usable since the Wizard is not taking damage in many fights, but the risk could be kind of interesting, I also thought if this was done they could make the spell cast-able on Allies since it would be an element of risk in putting it on your fighter. Perhaps it would be too strong on ranged allies though.

Apologies to PrimeJunta and anyone else wanting to make a Wizard thread today, but I spent a few hours typing this before I got distracted by DoT spells. So I'm going to make my own thread. People are probably sick of Wizard chat but I've been going over their spells and talents and would like to post some comments. I'll start by saying that I don't think the class is particularly weak, but it is a bit one dimensional and some of it's spells are not very compelling. I'll go through each spell from levels 1-4 and post some suggestions and remarks. First I'd like to make some suggestions regarding status effects. I think the status effects that are in the game could be made a bit more impactful and distinct from each other, many of the effects are purely statistical which contrasts sharply with the IE games. My suggestions: Blinded – mostly fine but I think it should be more useful against ranged enemies, make it also reduce the targets attack and cast range to something very short. Terrified – currently just a slightly better version of frightened I suggest to implement something that actually makes enemies run from you as the fear effect did in the IE games. With appropriately short durations I don't think this would be overpowered, though I understand if it would be difficult to implement and might cause problems with the engagement system. (Although you could say the same about the confusion effect that did make it in the game.) Frightened – change to “-15 Melee Accuracy, -15 Ranged Accuracy, -15 Will, -15 Concentration”. This is a modest buff to make it more distinct from effects like daze and I also feel the will and concentration effects are logical for frightened. Sickened – too similar to the weakened effect, I suggest to just remove it and replace sickened effects with either weakened or dazed as balance dictates. Weakened – change to “-4 Might, -4 Constitution, -2 Move Speed, -20 Fortitude.” Removed the penalty to Will as this overlaps with frightened but emphasised the physical effects a bit more. Some general issues with wizards spells: A lot of wizard spells are quite awkward to use. You spend a lot of time trying to hit moving targets with short range spells with small AoEs, and there are a lot of melee range spells in general. I'm going to recommend that a lot of spells have improved cast range, more useful AoE or be made into target-able spells with an AoE around the target. I'm going to suggest a few buff spells be made usable on allies. I realise this does not fit the theme of a Wizard but I don't see that this has to be needlessly strict. I find the endurance draining line of spells problematic, I don't believe they contribute much to the Wizards survivability (compared to say disabling or nuking whatever is trying to kill you.) Also relying on these spells as a gish type Wizard does not seem viable because of the Wizards low health multiplier, you will simply run out of health in one or two fights if your Wizard is taking damage. I'm going to suggest that these spells allow the Wizard to increase their endurance above the maximum (as Vampiric Touch did) and also that any endurance lost from the temporary buffer above the max does not contribute to health lost. I'm very much a fan of the defensive combat buff style of the AD&D infinity engine games, in which the Wizard has very strong but temporary “panic button” like spells. I don't believe these spells were particularly overpowered in concept (at least not the lower level ones like Mirror Image and Stoneskin) and they were mechanically interesting. The defensive self buffs in PoE are mostly underwhelming and don't feel worth using compared to their offensive spells. I don't understand how DoT spells work, the descriptions need to be clearer both in the spell info window and the combat log. Is resolve supposed to buff the duration, is might supposed to buff the damage, is DT supposed to be applied at each instance or only to the total. Are grazes and crits supposed to have altered damage or altered duration or both. Is there a standard damage "tick" time. What happens when the duration is not a multiple of this tick. Many DoTs seem buggy right now and have weird damage accounting. Please make the description clearly state something like “Deals N instances of X damage over T seconds” or “Deals X damage every T seconds for N instances”. Damage instances in the log should also state the effect of DT. Many wizard talents are pretty bad right now. In particular: Arcane assault. This is rubbish to be honest. I'm not a fan of low impact per encounter talents in general but I'm sure you can do better than this. Daze effect overlaps with the Priest interdiction talent, but in a much smaller AoE and does poor damage. Replace it with something more interesting, like a talent that summons a tin of beans or I don't know. Grimoire slam. Wasn't this supposed to knock the target back? Seems crap right now. Arcane Veil. Could just be buffed a bit. For a per rest talent it's not that attractive. VFX are bit obtrusive. Invulnerability spell heuristics. Pretty redundant in 392 with the cast point buffs. Some suggestions for new talents: Metamagic, talents that amplify either the Might bonus to damage, the Resolve bonus to duration or the Intellect bonus to AoE when casting a spell. At either a cost of using a spell slot at one level higher than normal or just something with limited uses per day. Grimoire Interference. Make a will attack on an enemy Wizard to force their grimoire into cooldown, disabling spell casting for the normal duration. Grimoire Imprint. Make this be a talent instead of a spell. It's a cool concept, probably not that useful in practice currently. As a talent it could work on spells of any level. Have the stolen spell added to your grimoire for a limited duration where it can be cast as you like consuming spell slots as normal. My suggestions would also be to make the stolen spell default to the last one the enemy wizard has cast, this would make it less random. Could also implement the interference idea above for this talent instead, forcing the enemy wizard's grimoire to go on cooldown when stealing a spell. Charged Blast. Make it so every time the Wizard casts a spell his wand becomes charged dealing bonus damage and bonus interrupt chance with the next attack only. Cheat Death. Once per day when the Wizard is knocked out he casts himself into a magical safe haven dealing damage to those around him. He reappears 5 seconds later in a prone state at 25% endurance. Malevolent Recoil – Effects an AoE with malevolent energy for a medium duration, anyone casting a spell inside the AoE suffers damage proportional to the level of the spell, that also has a chance to interrupt. Arcane Assault – Knocks enemies in the AoE back from the centre and blinds them for a short duration. Disarm - Self-explanatory. Expelliarmus! Individual spell review: 1st Level spells Arkemyr's Dazzling Lights – Seems a bit mediocre, I think the AoE could be more useful, perhaps making it a conical spell would be cool, it would remind people of the beloved Colour Spray spell from D&D. Chill Fog – Seems ok, haven't used it that much. VFX difficult to see in grassy areas. Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff – Strange spell. As I said I think spells that drain endurance are problematic for the wizard. My suggestion: instead of draining endurance make it so that each attack with the staff procs a fortitude attack that can drain a point of might from the target which stacks for the duration of the spell. This would give the wizard an incentive to go into melee as they would be powering up their spells for later. To balance this the duration of the spell should be reduced a bit and it could also be made a level 2 spell. Eldritch Aim – Useful spell. I think buffing up their wand arm and giving people the punches is not exactly what IE fans wanted to be doing with their wizards but I'll admit it's effective enough. Ghost Blades – OK spell, hobbled is good effect for the wizard in general as it reduces reflex. The AoE could be more useful though, it's not that easy to hit targets as they run towards you and actually benefit from the MS slow before getting engaged. Perhaps make the AoE a column. Kalakoth's Sunless Grasp – Possibly nerfed a bit too much in this version. Not using it much anymore. Could apply a weakened effect instead since there are many ways of debuffing accuracy already. Slicken – Seems a bit good. Could reduce the accuracy of the prone effect but add a secondary effect that reduces MS. Also bugged just now. Fan of Flames – Decent spell, probably my most commonly used level 1 spell. Jolting Touch – Seems strictly weaker than fan of flames in most cases, I'm not sure if the jump effect is working just now. I think the wizard has too many short range spells at this level so I recommend increasing the cast range and possibly renaming it to just “Jolt”. Minoletta's Minor Missiles – Missile spells zzzzzZzzzzzz... Fleet Feet – Description implies it can target allies and I think this should be the case. Not that useful in any case, my suggestion would be to make it so the buff also suppresses hobbled and stuck effects for the duration. This is stepping on the priests toes a bit, but not that much since it is a single target and very short duration spell. Thrust of Tattered Veils – Very situational. Wizard's Double – Possibly the worst spell in the game. I realise the AD&D equivalent Reflected Image was also not going to bring home any prizes but we don't need to copy AD&D in having useless trap spells. My suggestion is just to remove this spell, there is no need to have a “line” of image spells. Spirit Shield – DT bonus seems to stack with armour in 392. Am I missing something or this is extremely OP? It makes spells like Bulwark Against The Elements and Ironskin redundant and has a very long duration. Should be nerfed. I would like them to emphasise the “Spirit” aspect of the spell in some way, perhaps give a bonus against draining or paralysing attacks or something like that. 2nd Level spells Bewildering Spectacle – Seems decent. A bit short duration maybe. Could also be made a conical effect as I suggested for Dazzling lights. Bulwark Against The Elements – I think this spell is bugged, the Burn DT applies but all the others are listed as suppressed. Doesn't seem that useful in any case, elemental damage often comes in big bursts so 10 DT is not that much although if it stacks with armour it won't be awful. My suggestion would be to increase the DT to 20 but make the total damage absorbed limited to some value, as in the resist energy line of spells in 3e. Also a candidate to be made targetable on allies. Combusting Wounds – Not sure about this spell, description needs a bit of clarification. Any thoughts? Curse Of Blackened Sight – Seems decent. Fetid Caress – Good spell, the level 2 spell I use the most. Sickened effect could just be removed or replaced with Daze. Merciless Gaze – Seems good, although I feel like the game doesn't really need more things that increase critical hit chance. Miasma Of Dull Mindness – This is actually a very strong spell. I wonder if it will get nerfed since it was possibly designed before they changed the attribute system. Now perception and intellect are much more impactful, and the effect stacks with direct deflection and accuracy debuffs. Ray of Fire – Seems better in this version. Is quite weak against high DT but I suppose that's ok. Also I think the cast range could be improved. Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon – See my comments on DoT spell descriptions and endurance draining spells. Rolling Flame – Rebound physics seem all over the place. Could be fun when fixed. I think column AoE's should all be projected slightly forward of the caster so you can more easily avoid hitting allies standing adjacent to you. Infuse With Vital Essence – Similar to the siphon line of spells they could change this so endurance lost from the buffer does not cause health loss. Mirrored Image – Seems rubbish. Last time I tested this the deflection bonus decreased even on misses which doesn't seem logical, although actually I don't think it matters very much since misses are so rare in this game. My suggestion is just to make it work like the AD&D version, really it wasn't even that OP, limit it to 4 images and even make it a level 3 spell if necessary. Right now a “panic button” spell that allows you to completely avoid damage for a short duration would be quite welcome. A deflection bonus by itself does not really allow the wizard to survive on the front line and in any case I don't believe the bonus stacks with arcane veil so it feels redundant. If this is impossible then an alternative suggestion would be to make it so that the deflection bonus does not disappear on misses and also make it so the spell converts 100% of enemy grazes into misses, this at least would be more logical. Currently the “images” make you more likely to be grazed, but grazes still damage the caster. Necrotic Lance – See comments on DoT spells. Please improve the cast range. Kind of a boring spell, perhaps the corrosive aspect could be emphasised a bit with some kind of DT reduction over time? Binding Web – Decent. Good old web fireball cheese. 3rd Level spells Ardous Delay of Motion – AoE could be made more useful, it's hard to hit enemies as they run towards you. Could make just make the AoE larger or make it a targeted spell that effects an AoE around the target. Could use a small buff of some kind, I don't use it much. Concelhaut's Draining Touch – Endurance drain amount seems very low. Bit crap in general. Expose Vulnerabilities – Seems ok. Deleterious Alacrity of Motion – Endurance drain seems kind of pointless and could be removed. Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage – Will be a lot better if the terrified effect is changed as I suggested, otherwise seems very weak. Minoletta's Bounding Missiles – zzzzzzZZZZZZZzzz... Noxious Burst – If the sickened effect is replaced by the altered weakened effect as I suggested this will be a good spell. Fireball – Standard but decent. Crackling Bolt – I feel like fireball is the more useful AoE type, especially if you have high intellect. Could adjust the damage values to compensate. Rebound effect is random as hell. Llengrath's Displaced Image – If level 2 mirror image is buffed this could be removed. Arcane Dampener – I haven't found this useful in the beta, but I suppose it's dependent on encounter design. Kalakoth's Minor Blights – Can't seem to cast this in this version? I remember thinking the AoE effect was not that useful since there are few situations where you can hit multiple enemies with an auto-attack without also hitting allies. Haven't really tried it though. 4th Level spells Minor Arcane Reflection – Something else that depends on encounter design. Minor Grimoire Imprint – See comments above in the talents bit. Dimensional Shift – Cool concept. Seems to be bugged, the swap effect is not happening in 392. I think it should be usable on enemies as well as allies. Suicidal enemy spell casters could then swap in the players back line. Could be pretty fun. Confusion – Seems a weaker version of the level 2 spell. Should be removed? Essential Phantom – Still not working. One suggestion, possibly not completely original, would be to make it so that while the phantom is summoned the caster has a new ability which he can use to instantly jump to the phantoms location, destroying the phantom in the process and dealing lightning damage to anything in a line between them. Fire Shield – Could be useful if the Wizards defensive abilities are buffed but not great just now. Ironskin – Just make it like the AD&D version. Really, it will actually be fine. You can limit the number of skins to 8 or something. Just give it a go for one version of the beta. You have the power in yourself. The sky will not fall, BG2 fans will be happy. Wall of Flame – Pretty useful right now, but partly because the AI just stands in it even if attacking from range which it probably shouldn't do. I think it would be cool if you had to pass a will check to pass through the fire, but I'm not sure how to implement that.

Someone help me out here, how do DoT spells work in this game? I haven't paid attention to them before. Am I dumb or are they a bit strange. If I make Druid with 19 resolve and 11 might and cast Autumn's Decay on the House Harond Guard on the Bridge, I get - a graze reports in the log that the DoT will deal 20.6 damage over 4 seconds, what follows is 2 damage instances of 14 damage each. - a hit reports the DoT will deal 20.6 damage over 7 seconds, what follows is 3 damage instances of 6 damage each. The spell description windows says the DoT should last 5 seconds, not mentioning any influence from the resolve stat. The guard has 11 DT against corrode as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if or how DT is taken into account. I tried the insect plague spell as well which shows more sensible hit/graze behaviour (i.e grazes do not do more damage than hits) but also shows weird accounting in the damage instances.

Are there any other differences between each companion other than reported in the descriptions? The bonuses for the wolf, stag and lion didn't seem worth using compared to the bear and antelope. Also can anyone confirm that Merciless companion is actually working? I noticed a damage bonus from it when the target was hobbled, but when the target was just flanked the bonus wasn't apparent even though the "Merciless companion" text appeared in the combat log.

A lot of the gamepedia stuff is out of date. E.g they have Barbarian deflection still listed as 5, I guess it will be right if it hasn't been changed though. Didn't they used to show those values? I'm sure I remember that. UI seems good. I like they have added tooltips for key words in the info windows, like for status effects and so on, this is pretty helpful. I was hoping the terrified effect was bugged in previous versions and was intended to actually make enemies run from you. Perhaps they are having problems implementing that, I see from the tooltip that it's just a stronger version of frightened. And frightened itself got nerfed I think? The number of statistical debuffs with no mechanical effects seemed a bit redundant already in this game. Not sure I like having to expand AoE spell info in the combat log. Enemy tooltips are appearing in the top left corner of the screen now? This seems a weird place for them. Having problems with my animal companion disappearing on save/load. Not sure how to reproduce. Seems to go away when I restart the game. Modals seem to deactivate all the time now as well. I don't remember that being a problem before. It's pretty annoying. Double click bug is gone. Woo hoo! Can't play with custom parties anymore. Being stuck with the BB derp squad is going to get repetitive as hell. In general I'm not enjoying this build as much playing on hard. It's not that it's difficult exactly, it's usually possible to blunder through encounters without reloading. However I'm finding the pace to be completely breakneck and everything is just a bit random. I sometimes try the same encounter multiple times with the same strategy and find it to go very differently depending on how the "initiation" plays out and I'm often not sure what happened to make the difference. My priest spends a lot of time chain casting heals like I'm playing an MMO. Damage in general seems very high, and armour and defensive strats seem weak. I've been trying some all naked games and it seems quite viable. Encounters in this build just feel a bit like I'm trying to gank someone in Dota, except it's a really daft version of Dota where spells can crit for some reason. I'm particularly worried about how party vs party gameplay in PoE. The rate at which you can pump out spells feels a lot faster in this build (and much much faster than in the IE games), and while some VFX issues have been addressed the screen can still be a hot mess at times.

Noticed some issues with the perception stat and the bonus to spell casting range. -Make three wizards with perception values of 3, 10, 19 (or any values that let you test a positive, neutral and negative range bonus.) -Stand them in roughly the same spot. -Select a ground target spell and observe the "out of range" indicators, the little feet icon that appears on the spell cursor. It appears at the same range for each wizard. -If you test the spell cast ranges themselves they appear to vary with perception as expected, so it's just the indicators that are wrong. -If you tell each wizard to cast the same spell from well out of max range, they will each run to roughly the same spot before casting. I think whatever is computing the closest pathing location to get within range before casting is not considering the perception range bonus. -Also if you do the above test you'll notice that the Wizard with 3 perception (and a range penalty) stops his walking animation before reaching his casting position and sort of judders his way over the last few steps in a strange way. One last point on range indicators, I've noticed a number of melee range spells and abilities (like Knockdown or Jolting Touch) that always display the feet icon regardless of how close you are, so that might be a general issue.

-On the main game screen right click on a spell in the ability bar to open the information window. -Without closing the window do the same thing again, on a different spell or the same one again, the new window appears. -Close the info window, observe the windows for any previous spell you opened are still visible and each have to be closed individually. This is not expected, I think the window should replace the previous one so you can go through your spells without having to close each one.

Some small issues with the Grimoire UI. -Open the Grimoire and scroll to a spell level that has all 4 slots filled -Observe the spells not learned on the left page are correctly greyed out as there is no space for them. -Left click on a learned spell slot on the right page to free a slot -Observe the spells not learned on the left page are still greyed out and left clicking on them does nothing. -Scroll to a different spell level and then back, and the spells now display correctly Note that if the spell slot is freed by left clicking on the learned spell on the left page instead it works as expected. Also it seems to be possible for the same spell to end up in more than one slot if you have an empty slot in your grimoire when leveling up. I think there is some kind of logical error in the way it checks if you have a spell already learned when populating new slots. -Open Grimoire and go to a spell level. -Learn the first 1,2 or 3 spells in the exact order they appear in the left page, leaving at least one slot free -Level up the wizard. -Observe the free spell slot(s) is populated with a spell already learned Also this is not really a bug but something I noticed when picking up a dropped Grimoire, there seems to be no way to open the spell info window for spells you haven't learned yet. This would be desirable before choosing to spend the gold on a new spell. My suggestion would be to make it so that right clicking a spell in the right grimoire page shows the spell info window as it does for the left page. Then make it so the option to learn the spell appears as a button on the bottom of this window if available, in the same style that the "Enchant" and "Compare" options appear in the item info window. One last point. The wizard NPC who drops a grimoire in the Dryford crossing has the spell Chill Fog in a second level spell slot. It's actually a first level spell!

Saving the game doesn't appear to remember your selected weapon set. On reload I always see the first weapon set selected.

I think there is an issue with "stasis" like spells and overlapping status effects. By stasis spells I mean the 3rd level druid spell Beetle Shell and the 1st level priest spell Withdraw. This is most easily reproduced in the fight with the spectres in Lle a Rhemen since they have an auto-attack that stuns on hit. Steps: 1. Engage the spectres in combat, wait for a party member to get stunned. (Usually the poor BB rogue.) 2. Cast Beetle Shell on the stunned party member 3. Wait for the stun duration to expire. 4. Observe the party member can now move and attack, even though Beetle shell is still active.

If I understand correctly the dexterity attribute action speed bonus should reduce both the start up and recovery of all types of spell casting. I don't think this is working. Steps: 1. Make a new character, choose the Wizard class and set Dexterity attribute to 5 or some value that gives negative action speed. 2. Learn some of the same spells the BB Wizard has, such as Fireball, observe the BB Wizard has 19 Dex (+27% action speed.) 3. Remove armour from both Wizards so they are both naked. 3. Pause the game in combat and give both Wizards the same spell command, observe the spells are cast at almost the same time. 4. Pause immediately after casting and repeat the command. Observe the recovery bar diminishes at the same speed and the next spell is cast at the same time. I also tested this by making a 20 dexterity priest and did the same tests against the BB priest who has 12. I get the same results wearing no armour, no influence on casting speed or recovery.

There are various AoE spells in the game that hit or fail to hit targets unexpectedly. This happens with both offensive spells and buffs, I'm sure I see any pattern to it why this happens, I'll list three examples but I think most spells should be reviewed for this problem. The Druid spell Burst of Summer Flame does not hit either wurm in the AoE: The Priest spell Armour of Faith misses the BB rogue in the green circle but hits the druid with the Sabre: The Priest spell Holy Meditation hits two targets clearly outside:

Various spells in the game have a directional cone or column AoE. The displayed AoE behaves strangely around impassable terrain. Target a spell like Fan of Flames at an impassable cliff and the displayed AoE is strangely distorted as shown in the image: Column base AoEs have the issue that they often appear shorter than they should. I'm not exactly sure what causes this, the image below shows an example with the Rolling Flame spell: There is also the issue that when casting some column spells my character has to move before casting them when I'm not expecting this. This happens particularly common with the Iconic Projection priest spell. It's possible the casting range is just set incorrectly.

I don't like this exactly, but I'd suggest a similar idea: Make it so you can click on a name in the combat log to add a temporary filter that only shows items relevant to that character. You could then remove the filter by clicking on the name again or double clicking anywhere in the log. This would be useful for those cases where you're thinking "my character is nearly dead suddenly, what the hell did that", or "I'm sure I told that guy to cast a spell, did it actually do anything?"

One thing I'm not sure about is why the distance criterion for disengagement is so small. Didn't it used to be the case that you had to actually disengage to proc a disengagement attack? I haven't been following the debate but is there a reason this was changed? I find it annoying because it means I can't make small adjustments to my positioning in melee, for example say I want my fighter to shuffle slightly to the left to make more room in a choke-point for someone to join him on the front line, now I get a disengagement attack when I'm not really trying to disengage or kite anyone. I would also make two suggestions to tone down disengagement. One is just to make it so disengagement attacks can't crit, this would make the maximum penalty for disengaging lower and more predictable and perhaps reduce the feeling of "ok so just never move ever". The other is make the dexterity stat give bonus deflection against disengagement attacks only. This seems like it would be an appropriate bonus for dexterity, like the tumble skill in DnD and would bolster an otherwise underwhelming stat a bit.

I don't think the game should have turn rates. And I don't know why you keep mentioning Dota, it's a completely different style of game and any lessons from it are not likely to be useful for a bunch of reasons.

I installed the latest version for the first time on Saturday and played for just over an hour. While in game I noticed the screen persistently flickering to black, this intensified over the hour and then the game crashed showing a blue screen of death. Subsequently I wasn't able to start windows which displayed the blue screen error: "STOP C00007B: Bad Image, winsrv.dll is not designed to run on windows or contains an error". The usual attempts to perform startup repair, restore or system file checks didn't succeed and I ended up having to re-install windows. Since re-installing things seem to have been working fine, although I haven't dared to try and play the game again. I've attached a dxdiag for my system, although note this is likely to be inaccurate when it comes to things like drivers since this is after the re-install. In particular I believe the drivers for my Radeon had been updated a week or two before the crash and were likely the latest 14.301.1001 version, but I couldn't swear by it. Does anyone have any insight into this problem and how I might avoid it in future? Could it be some kind of hardware issue? In particular what exactly is winsrv.dll? Something to do with the graphics driver perhaps? DxDiag.txt

There's no reason a perceptive character has to be "bumbling", that's completely arbitrary. What if you want to make a frail but keen eyed old man who is slow as balls but still a dab hand with a rifle? Take per and dump dex. Your action speed will be slow but you will be accurate and from a longer range. There's nothing unreasonable about this. In any case why single out perception for narrative consistency problems, when there are things like intellect boosting deflection and resolve boosting status effect durations for martial classes? Both of which pale next to might influencing damage for both spells and firearms. Which has been like that since the beginning. The "Sawyerist" approach to attribute balance has been the topic of discussion since the project started. There's pages of nerdrage about it on the codex.

The entire debate about the code seems pointless, since the whole "intellect affects crit severity" thing is something we have no reason to think is true in the first place. Arguing that we can't prove it's not true because they might have perversely put hidden goblins in the code to add this undocumented effect is not making it any more plausible. The very first release notes for the backer beta explicitly state that perception and resolve were underwhelming and would be changed. These changes or something similar were going to happen anyway. Instead of writing 10 paragraphs of nonsense about how the previous build let you larp a train conductor with high charisma whose cheery demeanour improves his healing spread something something, try explaining what specific change you don't like and why. Which change is actually making things worse for narrative consistency, or "undermining roleplaying" and why. How exactly is a significant portion of the game being scrapped? The only substantial thing you have to say seems to be that you think Per + Might builds are over-powered now but you don't explain why they would be any more so than Dex + Might builds in the last patch that you thought was so great.

Perhaps it would speed things up if you explained why you think this is true. It's not remotely clear what you're even talking about.