Ninjamestari

Yeah, but we've seen this in other cRPGS as well. It takes resources to develop NPC reactions based on race during conversations, and most times implementation of racial reaction is probably toward the bottom of the priority stack. The godlike are otherwise mostly fine as an alternative race and they provide a lot of color and variety to the setting. However, they are supposed to be rare. There were too many of them present in PoE, I think in large part because of the backer NPC selections. We may see fewer of them in PoE2. I think you missed the point. The point is that Obsidian wasn't committed to fully implement the god-like plausibly, and thus they shouldn't have implemented them at all. The godlike would've been fine as and alternative race and they would've provided a lot of color and variety to the setting, if Obsidian had been committed to implementing them properly.

Modal upkeep-based buffs, courtesy of a functional mana-system.

I get the "opportunity cost" line of thinking. But if almost every fight is "post-buffed" anyway then its not really a cost is it? Let's take a fight with the fampyr for example. Do you begin with a CC or a buff? if you begin with the buff, you give the fampyr enough time to charm one of your party members; that's a pretty big opportunity cost right there. Starting the fight with buffs is definitely not the 'standard' in every situation. I don't like not being able to buff before the battle that much, but I can't deny that it provides for a more tactically challenging experience.

Mmm, I believe armor impacts your recovery speed, which would effect how often you can cast spells. A lightly-armored Wizard can thus fire off more spells in the same duration. High Dex also helps. Yeah, with the downside of you being squishy as ****, but if you ever run into a situation where having an armor is more important than having the extra speed, you can just equip a damn full plate and become indestructible with a DR buff or two.

The problem with pre-buffing is easily adrerssed by not having so many damn buffs in the first place. A gazzillion different buffs don't really add anything to the game to be honest, there are a ton of spells that you'll ever need in the game. Pre-buffing only becomes tedious if you start casting more than 2 or 3 buffs per character.

There's nothing wrong with being powerful, as long as it is accompanied by a proper weakness. Obsidian's obsession of treating armor the same way regardless of class and other character traits robs them of their key weakness.

I'd bring an Arquebus to my wizard duel and just shoot the other guy in the face.

Finesse doesn't really go well in the front lines in this particular technological era. In order to dodge a direct blow, you need room to maneuver. A strong direct attack cannot simply be parried away if you have no room to maneuver, or you're fighting against multiple opponents and moving away from one blow means effectively moving towards another. I really don't support 'finesse' tanks, they're not plausible in the least. What I think is that deflection should suffer a stacking penalty every time you get swung at that you rapidly recover from, so that against foes that attack slow and powerful and you have the time to recover from your evasive maneuvers, dodge is better, but against multiple foes you'll get torn to pieces.

All the more reason to adopt the 'x damage per second for y seconds' design standard.

Don't be silly, everyone knows that Thac0 is a goblin monk.

I wish they would avoid half measures and designs that require more commitment than they're able to invest in them. The godlike problem illustrates perfectly why the godlike race was a bad idea to begin with; obsidian wasn't committed to taking the concept all the way through. Same with ciphers. If you can make choices in your character creation that drastically alter the way that character would approach dialogue, you have to make sure that those classes get the special treatment, otherwise you end up with an experience that detracts from the characters class identity, which detracts from the overall involvement of the player, which leads to an inferior overall experience. The godlike are too different to realistically expect them to be treated the same as any other character, and the cipher's whole ability of reading and influencing the thoughts of others, even in the most mundane of situations, is almost completely absent from the game. Let's have an example of a 'class' that has a special approach to dialogue. If anyone has played Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, you may remember that the Vampire Clan of Lunatics, the Malkavians, had their own special dialogue choices for every single encounter to reflect their madness and even in that game the responses that still had to be mostly tied to the same lines that a 'normal' vampire would get would sometimes produce the feeling that the game didn't properly represent how the world should react to the character. Overall, if you allow the player to have an option that is vastly different, you'll have to be committed to going all the way through, like Troika did. It's one of those situations that demonstrate the stupidity of half-measures. As an important side note to those who have been involved with the whole resting-system discussion; you should notice how the trend that when creating a system, you don't really achieve anything with it if you don't fully commit to it, meaning that you can't get a meaningful resting mechanism unless you make it really hardcore. I'm only bringing up this off-topic issue here in order to illustrate the importance of commitment, and recognizing design choices that require more commitment to make them work. The godlikes and ciphers are one example. So back to the original topic here, I wish they will specifically avoid making design choices they are not fully committed to see through to the end; a half measure is usually a lot worse than no measure at all, so again I stress this point emphatically: avoid designs that require more commitment than you are prepared to invest in them, and avoid half measures.

So int doesn't increase the overall damage of a dot? seriously? They should get rid of the "x damage over y sec" formula and instead use "x damage per second for y seconds" to keep things easy to read.

Honestly I wouldn't mind this, but for a lot of people a steep power curve is desirable. They want that feeling you get when you stomp on an enemy that was once the bane of your existence. **** those people. Messing the games challenge curve completely just to achieve one petty feeling is just crappy game design; it's not worth it no matter how you look at the thing.

Or how about just getting rid of ridiculously steep power curves? I really don't understand why people want to go for some weird fancy solution when a perfectly good simple and eloquent solution is available.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, I guess. It wouldn't be my preference. That's pretty much what I suspect is happening: those who didn't like the system complained and shouted on the forums while those who did like it just got on with it because, well, they liked it so why would they complain? As a result, it looked like more people complained than there actually were. Most people I have actually spoken to in person liked the system, and I seriously doubt the average player just nuked every encounter and then ran back to town. I bet the average player simply played a Cipher or some other class that didn't have vancian mechanics.

The stacking rules are kinda stupid; I really see no reason why the same character shouldn't be able to equip multiple items that give a bonus to the same stat. Stacking up that strength to create a monster is fun, nitpicking bonuses based on some arbitrary stacking rules is the very antithesis of fun.

I think obsidian has fallen to the trap of trying to fix something that ain't broken here. I really don't like the endurance system, as that also was a fix to a problem that didn't exist. Why can't people just stick to basics and build upon that instead of trying to make these fancy new systems that don't serve any purpose what so ever.

I seriously don't understand what was wrong with the old, tried and true, "once your hitpoints drop to zero, you die" approach.

To the OP: Umm... how about NO! I seriously don't want PoE to turn into a friggin cartoon world where characters look like those action figures that are sold to kids who are too stupid to build with legos.

50% really?? Keep it going folks! :D

No to imported equipment and level, I want a clean start.

On the outside, the witcher games seem like they're perfect, I should like them, they should be my favorite games. Yet I detest them all, and never was able to finish any of them. Never even progressed much beyond the beginning before I lost interest to be honest. I think Gromnir got it right, that game is full of that juvenile self-righteousness and wannabe-mature content.

Somewhere in this very thread, several times if I'm not mistaken ^^ That is the problem; you can't really make a working compromise properly, you either go all in and enforce hardcore resting restrictions, or you do away with the whole mechanic. Inconvenience isn't necessarily a bad thing though, but I prefer the inconvenience of slow regeneration to the inconvenience of returning to an inn every other fight.

To be fair, the kind of opportunistic personality that is required to excel at those skills often leads to mischief and criminal behavior. It's the opportunity that makes a thief. What you're good at has a tremendous influence on the kind of personality you develop, even more so if those skills happen to be the ones you have to rely upon to survive.

Damn you people, This new information about Gjefa has made me want to create a new Dwarven Love-Machine with natural 19 CON. Actually, I think that concept might warrant an NPC in the game. Now where was that Dwarven Companion Recovery Front....