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Casters are not going to be tanking and doing heavy damage. They still have lower base deflection and HP, don’t they? Probably missing some tanky talents only fighters and paladins get?

Sawyer said in a talk he gave on developing the attributes that in beta they tried starting everything at 1, and every point after was a bonus. Mathematically it is the same as what we have now, but people just prefer feeling penalized for taking a dump stat. Or rather it reduces the urge to min/max.

I mean, POE1 has a 19 perception attribute check to notice that someone drank something quickly. Really that should be more like... 8. Well-rounded characters should expect a well-rounded handful of dialogue rewards throughout the game, not all of them early on and none of them later.

I'm with you, brother. I don't want class bonuses to skills, either. Or bonus stats for races. Let all roleplaying choices be free!

This is like a custom adventurer for the beta, not a companion or sidekick, right?

To answer your question, the bonuses matter because they let you raise a stat above 18. Otherwise you are right, you just move a stat point to adjust for it.

They are still there. What gave you the idea they were gone? Alhoon said he posted every single racial, but they weren't included. I'm not mad or calling him out or anything; I think it's awesome what he did. Just answering your question. He only listed the racial powers/abilities. These aren't in the character creator UI. The stats bonuses didn't change from POE1 and visible when you created a character. Thank you for clarifying.

They are still there. What gave you the idea they were gone? Alhoon said he posted every single racial, but they weren't included. I'm not mad or calling him out or anything; I think it's awesome what he did. Just answering your question.

So racial stat bonuses are gone? No more choosing your race to get a bump to your primary stat(s)?

Was it also badass to plink away with your wand through most fights so as to save your badass spells? Do you think Eder really appreciated that? Or making him go to bed when he wasn't tired?

I mean, the drawback is a lot smaller than that of the Wizard Slayer. But how good are the spell resistance and spell disruption? How often do we face a caster, anyway? In POE1 it was pretty rare, though POE2 looks like it will have more kith foes.

I did not. To quote myself from nearly a year ago:

I wonder if it relates to a fighter/ranger being called a hunter.

For all we know (until someone in the beta tells us) engagement is fighter and paladin only and is an instant kill if broken.

The person asking this question says engagement is less commonly seen. Maybe that means it's also tougher to break? https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/166304010241/hey-josh-small-question-since-melee-engagement

Rods are two-handed. They are long, like a staff, and fire magical projectiles. What is this thread about? A rod made of wood? A rod... But twice as long. Rods are real short in Pillars 1 How am i supposed to overcompensate with that short stick?! OK. I can get behind that. Yeah, what's a wizard without a magic staff? Just make 'em longer and have badass mofo animations.

Rods are two-handed. They are long, like a staff, and fire magical projectiles. What is this thread about? A rod made of wood?

Divination in PoE is conspicuous by its absence, as is the lack of an invisibility spell. I guess they didn't want the Wizard to upstage sneaky characters? Exactly. In 3e, DnD changed invisibility to instead give a large bonus to your hide skill. It did nothing for move silently and you could still be spotted. It was a good change. Divination was kind of goofy in BG... there was a spell or two to spy an area of the map, I think, but basically aside from Identify the school’s only purpose was for dispelling invisibility. Better to have neither invisibility nor divination.

DnD 3.5 complicates it by having you give up two schools, but you can choose which, but you can’t pick Divination as one of them. On the other hand if you specialize in Divination, you only have to lose one other school. 3.5 has 8 schools plus the “universal” school that is totally uninvolved on this. So they lose 25% if the spell schools to our 40%. They can cast a spell from their school once more per day for each spell level (one more 1st level spell, one more 2nd level spell, etc.) and gain +2 to skill checks on the school, such as scribing scrolls. What they do not get are a separate special ability or a bonus to casting the spells. They don’t get a penalty to other spells ether, though. So special abilities must be pretty awesome. Perhaps it is that that we will use to decide our specialty, rather than our prohibited schools, as we have theorized.

For comparison, I present the spell school list from Baldur's Gate: Abjuration - Alteration Conjuration - Divination Enchantment - Invocation Illusion - Necromancy Alteration is basically transmutation, and abjuration is basically the generic control of magical energy -- mostly buffs and removing buffs. To abjure means to formally reject or renounce, so perhaps the idea behind the name is magical barriers. Does this list make any more sense than POE2's?

It could be balance, but isn't the goal for all schools to be balanced in terms of usefulness? More specifically, it may be they want specialist wizards to be somewhat well-rounded, ironically. If we think of it like this, and I am not saying my interpretations are 100% accurate: Conjuration: summons Enchantment: crowd control Evocation: damage Illusion: utility Transmutation: buffs It becomes: Conjurer: summoning, utility, damage Enchanter: crowd control, utility, buffs Evoker: damage, buffs, summons Illusionist: utility, summons, crowd control Transmuter: buffs, crowd control, damage And that makes a little more sense.

We do, though I only thought about what schools should be opposed. You raise a good point. For example, a conjurer can use enchantment spells, though they couldn’t be more different. I agree that if there is a rhyme or reason to their chart, I don’t see it.

For example, I think this makes more sense thematically, though I don't know about balance: Primarily I considered whether a school has more to do with affecting (transmutation, enchantment) or creating (evocation, conjuration, illusion). Beyond that, illusion is about creating nothing real, while transmutation and conjuration are about real matter. There are other justifications, but I think most can be inferred from what I've said and I don't want to make this TLDR.

The opposed schools aren't completely random. I suspected this was the case and drew up a chart to confirm: If anyone wants to have a robust discussion on what should be moved where, now we can do so more easily.

It's worth noting that the vanilla classes are meant to be competitive with the subclasses. It's not Baldur's Gate 2. I think the special ability is going to be the a big selling point for the wizard subclasses. We also don't know how big the bonus to the focus school will be, AFAIK. I like the idea of wizard subclasses being so different from one another, but I'll concede they seem to differ more from one another than the subclasses of other classes do. My concern is that we'll need certain spells for certain encounters and not have access to them. In POE1, you need to paralyze the Sky Dragon, for example. For the fight with Thaos, you need the wizard's Arcane Dampener spell specifically. When I say "need," I mean I am sure someone has done it without them, but yeah basically need. The point is it would suck to have a fight be made much more difficult because you are missing a particular spell. Then again, maybe with wizards, priests and druids no longer getting access to their complete spell lists, they know this and are already making sure it doesn't happen.