Mr. Magniloquent

A simple solution would be to introduce proficiencies, but that would further convolute what were supposed to be flexible and intuitive systems. I also doubt that the designers would want characters to be able to wear certain armors "penalty free", even at the cost of talents. The dilemmas runs deep in PoE.

Not true. Free, unlimited, ultra-bonused disengagement attacks heavily favor that the "kitee" will decimate anyone attempting to retreat.

There isn't anything respectable about cooldowns. Like the OP said, it's a lazy and heavy-handed way to avoid the drudgery of good design. Anything cooldowns can do other systems can do better.

It's been several versions since I've given the cipher attention, but I have always favored quick rapid attacks for several reasons. Since you always start combat with a given focus, you typically only need a bit more to get what is needed for most battles. Smaller weapons, like stilettos, also better penetrate DT/DR which makes your focus collection more reliable. The use of focus oriented talents augment anything these smaller weapons lack. Most importantly, smaller/faster weapons strike more quickly, and recover faster. The goal is to cast spells, not gather focus to mount on your wall.

Luckman said it best here already. This decision does not make sense with the existence of a punitive engagement system and recovery penalties already so deeply enforce static combat. PoE combat is already overwhelmingly about the initiation and little else. I think these recovery penalty and movement choices could be cleared up if they just changed the way disengagement attacks work, but that's clearly not going to happen.

Agreed with the others. D&D 5th Ed. is if 2nd had been less rigid and nonsensical, or if 3rd weren't so amorphous and cumbersome. It's a flavorful, refined, and efficient hybrid of the two with some modern updates. Several things from the 13th Age RPG were also borrowed, which was like a majorly house-ruled and abbreviated D&D anyway. 5th ed is easy to homebrew, and is encouraged to do so. Also, be cautious when reading reviews about it online. It had a very lengthy open-beta/playtest/creation, and there is alot of very outdated information about it still floating around. It's a big deal though--a total redemption. It's just going to be tougher to get noticed as that, since there is alot of great competition out there now.

Wizards are very poor at melee for the reasons you have mentioned. Do not believe Ciphers to be more durable though, they are actually even more vulnerable. Ciphers work best at the flank harrying and disrupting enemies focused elsewhere.

I find pikes absolutely invaluable. Their reach helps me keep characters not intended to tank (further) away from harm, and their DR/DT bypass is significant. Because engagement radii are set, it's not so much they they stay outside of it as it is that it creates great phalanx opportunities when combat opens, and their greater distance causes the AI to target them less often. Only dedicated offensive casters and tanks don't receive a pike in my parties. They are my preferred default weapon. As towards engagement, yeah, it's screwed up. I'll not turn this thread into an engagement debate, but engagement was really handled in the worst way possible. Yes, and it's the best edition yet. Be sure to check it out.

Agreed. I noticed this from the get-go as well. It's a system of guaranteed damage. Defense is almost pointless. The only way to mitigate damage is to setup ambush style tactics for an overwhelming victory. That characters only get "knocked out" only fuels this style of play. I think DR is more of a symptom of the intended Miss/Hit/Crit philosophy than a beast of its own, but the two are so deeply entangled that they might as well be the same problem. Except that it's not trivial. By adding various forms of DR/DT with almost guaranteed hit/damage and a deliberate exclusion of hard-counters, PoE has an extraordinarily difficult system to balance. The addition of variable attack speeds, interrupts, and disengagement attacks/bonuses only exacerbates these issues. PoE is probably the single most difficult game to balance I have ever encountered. Not well. This is something I've tested extensively. I attribute this more to the poor quality of defensive spells more than the low base deflection of the classes. Defense spells do no confer enough of a bonus to be worthwhile and have prohibitively short durations. The absence of hardcounters, presence of (nearly) assured damage (received), with low health multiplier cause them to operate very poorly at the lead. Combat is brief and immobile, while the AI is simple. If they target your caster, your caster will not have the time to get all of their buffs going--be assured that they will need every single one. Even should they get them off, they will still take damage that the class will not withstand. Even still, their buffs last too briefly to be of real use. Ultimately, you expend the caster's entire daily complement in a single battle to achieve a far inferior result.

Spells do not scale, so it is very unlikely that the chants will scale either. This may cause problems for the class as it reaches higher tiers. The summons have been effectively to me in the Backer Beta, but it's been several versions since I've given them a thorough play-through or vetting. Don't expect them to be terribly powerful, as Mr. Sawyer has an aversion to summoning.

I would abstain. I don't care for a significant amount of Mr. Sawyer's choices. I think PoE will be enjoyable, but has thus far missed the mark on what I really wanted out of an IE successor.

I feel that the chanter is best served with a melee weapon possessing reach, like a Pike. This way their chants will be better spread across characters, while allowing them to keep a reasonable distance to flank and not provoke engagement.

Even if Iran never uses the nukes it could develop; Iran simply having them would pose a huge problem. Iran possessing nuclear weapons would be the single most powerful force for peace in the middle east. Why is it, that since the advent of hydrogen bombs that no two countries (possessing them) have ever experienced a direct conflict? Why is it, that nuclear nations have only ever conducted proxy wars? Why is it, that any time these nuclear armed nations have come close to open and direct war, they have each collectively stepped back and realized the foolishness of it all? An armed society, is a polite society. The invasion ambitions of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Israel, The USA, The UK, and several other countries, would be dashed in an instant. Israel would now be forced to play nice in the sand box. The USA's hundreds of military bases, armies, navies, and air forces riddling the region would become obsolete. A nuclear armed Iran would bring not only the middle east, but much of the world closer to peace. The only risk of Iran having nukes, would be that the rabid dog that is Israel would play Russian-roulette with humanity and pre-emptively push the red button first.

On a purely lore basis, PoE will not compete with D&D immediately. The Forgotten Realms (chiefly), has had dedicated writers for decades. I'm betting the plot and intrigue within PoE will be its greatest success (IE: writing), so there are no concerns of the luke-warm, tired, "save Middle Earth Ferelden from the horde" trope. I've written it many times before, but I feel one of the most obvious problems with PoE will be that it tries to be "not D&D". This is viewable in everything from the classes, races, and spells. Orlans might be the exception. The problem is that it doesn't commit to be the "anti-D&D" that PS:T was. That game was a deliberate subversion of the entire franchise and genre. PoE to me feel more like someone trying to reinvent the wheel by making it elliptical instead of circular. It moves...but questionably. The IP is very new, and the mechanics will likely not survive past the expansion, so there is plenty of time. So long as PoE's story, characters, and immersion success, the brand will have time to find its way. Today's RPG audience cares far more for those than game play. PS: I'm very happy they strayed from the middle ages and have flirted with a renaissance period. That's an excellent choice.

PoE will be a more modern Arcanum. I'm betting it will have all of the same strengths and weaknesses. As such, I would not worry about incoherence with quest resolution and plot choices.

I really hated them along with the whole pre-buffing regimen - perhaps because I could never get on board with them and still almost always play with very limited buffing which of course made such battles much more difficult/annoying for me I never understood this. With vanilla BG, most any wizard could simply be defeated by Breach + Auto-attack. If you were feeling lazy, smack them with a lvl2 Melf's Acid Arrow when they are casting a spell and watch every single spell fail for the next several rounds in addition to half of their meager health. An archer on point with an elemental arrow. Any weapon with a additional damage type. Berserker Rage. Inquisitors. Death Spell/Death Fog for nearly all summons. Sequencered Skull Traps. Scouting/Scrying/Wizards Eye + Backstab. Theif Detect Illusion ability (unlimited, nearly instantaneous, togglable True Sight). Improved invisibility. The list goes on an on. If you couldn't defeat mages in vanilla BG, you didn't understand the game you were paying and/or were totally devoid of creativity.

Despite being 3D and Turn Based, I already feel that Larian's Divinity: Original Sin got more "old school" things right and is a better spiritual successor. PoE pigeon holes far too many things for my tastes and comes off as a deeply contrived but inferior form of D&D. I want to believe that many of the things I dislike about PoE are just birth-pangs, but in reality they are fundamental disagreements with design that I find to be deeply not IE. This is not to say I wanted a clone. Look no further than D:OS for an example of what was great about 1990s RPGs being brought to a modern date. Having been very involved in the beta, I cannot reiterate that opinion with PoE.

The Bleak Walker Order/Oath may appeal to you mechanically, and several others may appeal to you from a role-play standpoint. I would not hope for anything beyond what you already know of the PoE paladin class, as each class is very narrowly defined to an MMO fashion. From a lore perspective, every class within PoE utilizes some form of soul power/magic to perform their supernatural or fantastic abilities--some just appear more mundane than others. An idealistic cleric or cipher may be better suited to you than a paladin for this game.

Per rest model just isn't well suited to PoE with Mr. Sawyer's re-imagining of the classes. Spells are either too impotent, too scarce, or combat too frequent. Correcting any of these would make wizards useful, which shall not be permitted. Obsidian needs to seriously consider spell points over pseudovancian if they want to keep spells marginal and combat as frequent as they are.

This a thousand times over. It's all a waste of time. Vulgarities were so forbidden, that we stuffed as many of them into a sentence as possible just for the catharsis. Sometimeswhile walking home, my best friend and I used to sing "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" with more explicit substitutions than original lyrics. That came from the childhood mind of a honor Role student, Safety Patrol Captain, Talented and Gifted student, and Student Council Vice President. Waste...of....time. The correlation is significantly stronger with prescription psychoactive drugs.

Yeah, I've said it many times before, but a party of Hearth Orlan rogues armed with pikes is devastating. You stealth up to surround the enemy as closely as possible, then initiate the attack with one rogue. Pause in the middle of their attack animation, then queue up all of the others to attack their nearest opponent. There will be such a flurry of critical sneak and disengagement attacks like you hath never seen. Battles, even with multiple Stone Beetles last less than 10 seconds. I've been meaning to create a party of six ciphers, but I just haven't had the time. Conceptually there are a lot of single class parties that might be interesting. Six barbarians with reach weapons configured to maximize their carnage radius would be neat. Stacking paladin auras, cascading burning holy radiance, six rangers and their six pets swarming an enemy, etc. I think the most potent combinations will be the parties which can maximize burst DPS with (preferably AoE) per encounter abilities. I see priests and druids being the best at this. Six Iconic Projections anyone?

Hearth Orlan is where it's at. In a D&D setting, I typically prefer gnomes both mechanically and characteristically. Orlans are filling those same preferences for me. Try getting a team of these guys together. It's brutal.

I like owning my games. Paying money to access a game rubs me the wrong way. I also anticipate heavily modding this game. Steam makes that a headache.

I won't approach critiquing wizards. It's already been said, and yes, they are horrid in PoE. That aside... In PoE, Rogues essentially are a fighting style. They function as vicious flankers and skirmishers. Since taking damage is all but guaranteed in PoE, I find them to be wonderfully useful because their tremendous damage output minimizes the length of combat. Disrupt with Cipher then murder with Rogue. Or just simply have a team of hearth Orlan pikers spec'd to critical as frequently as possible. Stealth up, position, unleash. Pure murder.