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I strongly disagree. For me 2H MUST be the best DPS. 2H > 1H Slow > 1H Fast > DW Slow > DW_Fast > > > Shield_Fast > Shield_Slow Speed add 'secret values' of DPS... at equal DPS... Ideally : 2H = 4s, with best DPS 1H = 3s 1H Fast = 2s It is logical, if your weapon is heavier, you attack slightly slower. Equal DPS = I choose Dual wielding because fast attack add an additionnal invisible DPS. (bottleneck effect = 50 000 damages on 30s recovery with an ennemy with 1 HP left... Loss of 49 999 damage, and I have to wait 30s) + Double effect of two weapons > One effect to one weapon. (Unique, Soulbound) I'm taking into account speed, namely that DW will hit more frequently than 1H_Slow or 2H which (rightfully) have the same speed in Deadfire. Giving DW the highest DPS and giving 1H and 2H lower DPS but situational advantages(high defense enemies and high armor enemies respectively) is inline with PoE's tradeoffs and doesn't further increase issues of underkill as MaxQuest calculated. And I would count the double effect as a weakness as well as an advantage for DW, because they've got to find another weapon with an on-hit effect or enchant one while 2H and 1H only need one weapon to find or enchant. Assuming Deadfire is like PoE, Unique and Soulbound will be very limited and outfitting a DW will be more resource costly than outfitting a 2H or 1H, unless we're swimming in Helwax Molds or whatever resources are required to get top tier enchantments.

Is there anyway to give them a bonus pen or accuracy when attacking certain armor weaknesses?

I think the best scheme for optimal dps would be something like DW_Fast > SW_Slow > 1H_Fast > 2H = 1H > Shield_Fast > Shield_Slow. HOWEVER, Pen would be adjusted so it works similar to PoE where 2H > Slow > Fast would be better against higher armor. If single handed retains the accuracy boost, we have a situation similar to PoE balance where DW has best dps under optimal conditions, 2H is best against high AR enemies, 1H is best against high defense enemies, and Shield remains best for absorbing damage. A big issue with deadfire beta in terms of weapon balance is the previous opportunity cost for using fast weapons has been removed and they now perform the same against armor as slow and 2H thus leading to an absolute dps advantage instead of a conditional advantage. A remedy I thought of was to have Fast have a base Pen of 4, Slow have a base Pen of 5, and 2H have a base Pen of 7, or effective against naked/light/medium armor respectively.

So I played more and whacked a lot of stuff in melee between casting spells. So far I've noticed that my Battlemage seems to be just a bit longer using fan of flames than he does swinging his greatsword, both in scale armor with no potions. However when he gains a dexterity inspiration it seems to switch with great sword attacks taking longer than FoF casts. Since weapon speeds were discussed as well, does anyone else think that going back to 3 sec recovery would feel better for weapons than the current 4 sec?

So far melee/casters can do better than buff, with Cipher becoming a whole lot more useful and (Skald) Chanters changing the least. Unfortunatly, the Berserker/Devoted Brute is better than either Berserker/Evoker Warlock or Devoted/Evoker Battlemage thanks to Carnage+Cleaving Stance and Frenzy+Tactical Barrage. A solution to this is reducing cast times of some single target spells, in particular ones with a short range like ray of fire, and maybe upping the Wizard and Cipher health to 40 +10/level like the other casters.

So I cheated and made a party of melee casters that I outfitted in fine equipment. Devoted/Evoker Battlemage, BleakWalker/Magran Templar, Beguiler/Assassin MindStalker, Fury/Stalker Beastmaster, and a CorpseEater/Skald Howler. It feels significantly better than the vanilla game so far and melee range casters have a lot more use, so if you like the spellsowrd/gish archetype this mod helps get closer than vanilla deadfire. However I'd knock down short/narrow cone and short-range single target(like ray of fire and divine mark) down to 1.5 sec casts and take a look at the duration of some buffs(namely eldritch aim because it gets beat out by a fighter equivalent starting out), but I undertsand that being out of the scope of the beta mod. Battlemage could do more than buff and his fan of flames was pretty good for clearing the front line, Templar did better than the merc priest, Mindstalker really shone and finally gave a use to cipher powers, beastmaster was a little weird but more viable than previous beastmsters I played around with, and Skald didn't change much but they were already good with offensive invocations. So MaxQuest was right about casting times, and while this table is good there should be better grouping along the lines of that mentioned in this post: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/95293-casters-are-still-slow/page-8?do=findComment&comment=1966941

You are a god damn god. Regarding pen, I think 2 handers could have 1 more pen and fast one handers could have 1 less (with the +2 adjustment Josh mentioned) in order to align with PoE where 2 handers were good for high DR opponents and fast were bad against them.

In PoE I found myself using similar openers for every battle, where before spell mastery I'd reserve spells for tough fights and sometimes let them go unused and after spell mastery still not use any unmastered spell much outside of certain fights. I understand the logic behind the Deadfire change and agree with it, but I think some adjustments could be made to where spell ambush isn't the tactic to use. Perhaps make spellcasting certain spells loud where it alerts enemies or something.

Unless it at the very least features Black Flag, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains then it isn't hardcore. Hardcore after 2000 is **** so I don't care of that's missing.

I've only taken proficiency into account for weapon focus and Devoted because for the most part they're too extreme to even be situational. Greatsword is the worst offender, with the accuracy Malus eating away the bonus damage by transferring your hits to grazes. I'm not sure if the solution is proficency tiers or tuning down some of the modals, but as of now the only way Proficiency matters to me is in regards to abilities. Speaking if which, why is Weapon Focus Barbarian exclusive? The loss of +6 accuracy on my weapon users is pretty heavy.

Eothas breaks all your **** and probably kills the pets. I'd guess that we won't see any uniques return.

It bothers me too, particularly when all player accessible Paladin orders aren't religious and one is pretty dark.

You're not touching my recreational nukes statist.

and beards. Seriously, beards as they are now look like placeholders. Only a teenager's growing for the first time would look that patchy and irregular. I could grow a full beard as a teenager, don't insult my high school beard by comparing it to Deadfire beta beards.

Best It's pretty, except for hair Multiclassing is cool Background skills for conversations is cool Camping supplies are gone and replaced with something better Proficiency is a better idea than a talent with 4-5 weapons(implementation is lacking though) A wait option Worst Balance is a mess Combat is too slow between long recovery and cast times There's quite a lot of unintuitive stuff, particularly with stacking Lack of talents is disappointing and sucks for characters who'd want weapon focus No "none" option for voice

On Normal it was that way, the choice of enemies in the slice of the game we've seen doesn't help that perception either. I haven't really played since the most recent patch, but just looking at the changes I still think spells will lag behind. In general there are .5 sec spells(mostly buffs), 3 sec spells, 5 sec spells, and 8 sec spells. Outside of buffs they generally take longer to cast the higher the level. I've gone out of my way to avoid the 8 sec casts and I think a lot of 5 sec casts should be 3 sec and many 3 sec should be 1.5 sec. Max Quest had a pretty good post on it, and I think suggestion any of his suggestions could be implemented without disrupting balance too much. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/95293-casters-are-still-slow/page-8?do=findComment&comment=1966941

I thought it was more of the case that of a wide versus tall build. Single class goes tall so it will have access to higher level spells, but multi goes wide and get's to grow faster than other-wise but is split between two pools. It's specialization versus variety. And relative variety is going to be impacted by this change. Right now multiclasses have an edge due to synergy, but giving single classes more abilities will undercut that by grabbing more passives and spells. Because they're spread out a lot more. This wouldn't be an issue if everyone got 2 ability points at level up, but with the lack of talents and shallower resource pools I think multiclasses will be at a disadvantage.

I'm concerned about the change in ability points to multiclasses, they were touted as trading power for versatility but giving single classes more ability points cuts into versatility for multiclass casters. Not sure what a good solution is, but I don't think this is it.

I can't remember what most spells in PoE do so I right click on the icon to read the description. Don't see how that was a big deal.

The first part is interesting indeed. This means the balance has shifted somewhat to where single classes will have more ability points and it would take multiclasses to Level 25 (28 if Level 10 abilities are introduced) to catch up with single classes and by then the single classes will have had 6 more opportunities to select high level abilities. I wonder how that balances, or if multiclasses get more abilties or tuneups elsewhere to compensate.

Meh. I still think his wisdom/intelligence was aided by Boo. Boo had enough wisdom and intelligence for both of them.But I totally disagree about stats in PoE. PoE made them matter less for any class. Flattened across the board. Joe That's more of an issue with degree, and frankly something I agree with to some extent. In D&D 3rd Charsima is only used for spell casting or special abilities for certain classes, outside of that it has no use in combat. In such a case why is it tied to an ability score instead being inherit to the class? What is good about PoE is there is some benefit to putting points into stats I would otherwise ignore because there was no benefit. There were still issues, like Resolve being easily dumpable, but overall I prefer it to 3e and immensely prefer it to 2e.

Be kind, now. He suffered a head injury. Okay, probably MANY head injuries. To be fair, though, he always described himself more as a berserker than a (technical) ranger. Boo is likely the only thing holding him together. Joe Well there's more cases than Minsc of "illegal" characters, like Aerie for instance. This is more due to the 2e rules being utterly insane and having very weird restrictions placed for arbitrary reasons. 3e and PoE opened things up a lot, but PoE did a better job in making stats matter for all classes even if Resolve was just as useless as Charisma.

PoE is easy enough where my 16 year old cousin who has never played a RPG like PoE was able to do ok on normal with an unoptimized fighter using choices he thought were cool. PoE isn't particularly more hard to get than IE games and you could create a character like Minsc if you wanted (which you couldn't in BG because Minsc is too dumb to be a Ranger). There are certainly issues that are unintuitive, but it's easy enough to just roll a character and get through the game. Deadfire on the other hand has a lot more traps in terms of stacking and takes too long to do anything.

The Wind the Shakes the Barley. Absolutely beautiful historical drama without any frills. Would highly recommend. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that or that such a thing would make one a bad critic. A big problem I have with a lot of critics is that they come off as too pretentious and aim to use a lot of words to say little, and it would be refreshing for someone to say they liked something without pulling a nonsensical justification out of their ass.

Deadfire seems to be a lot more complex than PoE, and PoE was signifigantly more math heavy than I remeber the IE games being. That said, I think the issues are mostly bad and confusing stacking rules, lack of progression in the armor/penetration system, uneven application of power level, and recovery time. Stacking rules would probably be the easiest to address, and should get a look immediately. It's unintuitive and dumb that the Paladin aura doesn't stack with the Fighter stance or that stacking an ability and racial doesn't give double resistance. Armor/Penetration is good on paper but for whatever reason it didn't adjust weapons to fit the new system and caps the bonus/penalty. A solution to the penalty would be to have diminishing returns/penalties for being over/under the armor value so loading out on penetration isn't completely useless and there's some benefit to being only a little above the armor rating. I believe MazQuest had a chart with some sort of similar suggestion, but he has too many good ones to keep track of. Weapon balance is an issue in itself, but with the changes to armor the limiting factor for fast weapons has disappeared making them the best to use in most cases while negating the advantage 2-handers had, solving this within the current armor system could be done by giving 2-handers an inherent 2 higher penetration(making them suited to dealing with medium armor instead of light) as well as homogenizing weapon damage like in PoE so we don't end up with clearly bad options like the warhammer. Power Level simply needs to affect more things. As of now, there is little reason for anyone but a caster using direct damage spells to use it on anything but replenishing resources. This would also even out multiclasses by giving them an actual disadvantage for most of their abilities. Enough has been said of casting times, so I'll just say I agree with everyone that it takes too damn long to do anything in Deadfire.