Doppelschwert

You know, that's not the first map of the expansion. That's the optional high level area you are supposed to tackle at the end of the game with max level. The main expansion content takes place in the white march (as the name suggests), which is to the top right on the world map.

When I checked yesterday after installing patch 2.0 and the white march, defender + wary defender gave +5 deflection, and cautious attack got downgraded to +8 deflection, which means a difference of 3 points in deflection. Calm down everybody. Also, veterans recovery is 1.5 endurance / 3 seconds, which means 0.5 /s on average, while the chanters passive healing yields 0.8/s alone and can be enhanced by another 0.5 for everyone surrounding you. It's really not that unbalanced as all of you think.

Actually, many bonuses in the vanilla game already lasted several rests before they expired, there just wasn't any UI indication of that. Regardless, josh announced some while ago that the would rebalance the resting bonuses through the entire game, so it's certainly better than before.

Well, 7 AM PST translates to 4 PM in my time, where GOG pushes some of their updates. So in principal it would be possible to release it simultaneously on all platforms today if 7 AM PST is true. Then again there is the question about the patch 2.0 - GOG usually needs a couple of days to adjust patches, so going by that it might be later (would be strange if they could release the expansion but not the patch). Anyway, I just realized I'm screwed today either way - even if GOG releases today, Obsidian probably won't unlock the codes until much later (which would be my evening). Then given my slow internet it will take forever to download the expansion and by the time it's done I can get to sleep to be able to work tomorrow .

Given that it hasn't been released yet, that sounds like a just retribution for someone who probably pirated the expansion and is impudent enough to go onto the official forums to ask for advice.

You can reset their attributes in any tavern as soon as the patch gets out, so don't worry.

Don't worry, I asked one of the moderators to discuss a modding forum with the other moderators again to move the thread there and gave him a link to decide for himself what would be best. I even argued that your thread should become a sticky (the one with the IE mod is also a candidate). The mods won't move your thread around without your permission I think.

I've been wondering about that as well. At the same time, I guess the lost armor slot will be controlled via a custom race trait that will try to balance things with other adjustments. My guess would be that josh meant with upgrading that she will get an inherent fine/exceptional/superb equivalent buff to her deflection, not that the DR will rise over time. I don't think they made that much effort into alienating here from the normal game mechanics. Probably the only change will be the loss of armor slot with everything else playing out exactly the same.

How very constructive... On topic, I'd like to know that too, especially since I can't access the patch yet with GoG. Weren't there people in other threads talking about enemies rushing besides your frontline to hit your guys in the back?

In particular, according to this http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/81218-pillars-of-eternity-the-white-march-part-1-areas-video/ all the areas in the white march* are for level 6-7 onward with optional upscaling, while there is a new area called Crägholdt in the Dyrwood which is probably only accessible in chapter 3 meant for high level characters and where there is no upscaling necessary since its supposed to contain a boss harder than everything in the base game. Note that we do not know how the upscaling works; whether its binary (midgame / late game) or continous (set enemies to your current level above 6) no one knows. * Stalwart Village and Durgan's Battery, which will probably make out most part of the expansion. Crägholdt is probably meant to enhance the third chapter content density, which is a good thing in itself from my point of view.

If you want the mods to notice, it's easiest to just contact them directly. Which I'll have done in a minute, wait for it... EDIT: ...done. We should probably make a bit more advertisement for a modding subforum while we're at it. BTW, I think this project is a really great idea and the progress so far is pretty impressive, keep up the good work!

More to the point, they also include new achievements for the addon! 4-5 as far as I can tell.

That math only applies to the relative utility. Going up in deflection, the points in crit range, hit range and grace range are replaced by a point in miss range respectively. This decreases your expected incoming damage by 0.015, 0.01, 0.005 respectively, where 1 corresponds to being hit consistently. So from an additive point of view, deflection scales worse than linear, while the attributes scale linearly. In particular, when you also try to consider DR, this analysis gets more nonlinear as well. The relative value of Con and Deflection can be thought of like this: Each time you double the value of con over 10, you can take twice as many attacks. Each time you halve the distance between your deflection and the enemies accuracy+100, you can take roughly twice as many attacks, assuming no DR. So, as you already noticed, the difference is that the number of hits you can take grows linearly with constitution but exponential with deflection. If you want the values such that a point in resolve is at least as good as a point of consitution in terms of attacks being able to take, you can only give it in terms of the difference between deflection and the enemies accuracy. If your deflection is much higher, resolve is the way to go, but if its low, con is the way to go. So dedicated tanks should always value resolve over con, but then again you should try to increase both of them anyway.

wait a couple of days, when patch 2.0 is released you can retrain your character ingame for a gold fee. just reskill accordingly and everything should be fine and won't break any achievements.

Thats nice information, thanks for sharing. Though it will be hard to top the images of the professor if you continue at this rate

As soon as the information was in the combat log for the first time, it is open information to everyone - for example, the defenses are displayed immediately at the tooltip of an enemy after you targeted them. With the 2.0 patch, you even get a hit percentage as additional information. The bestiary just gives you the information even before you strike a first blow against a specific defense, it is not necessary at all to fight against enemies multiple times to get that information. Incorporating this knowledge into the enemy AI would hardly be unfair in my opinion since the player can make informed choices based on these informations all the time (and is even encouraged to do so), and I doubt that the AI will ever be clever enough make the smartest decisions involving these information to own the player. Not sure what you are saying here - info in beastiary increases from 0 to 100% based on multiple encounters and until it's 100% the incomplete info is what I see in the tool tips (or would see if I used them which I don't). My question is at what point the enemy would have 100% of this information to make these sorts of tactical decisions from and why? It's exactly like I wrote it down: When you hit any enemy at any point with any action that targets a defense X, you get the value of X displayed in the tool tip. I just loaded a save, attacked a dargul for the first time, now its deflection value is displayed in its tooltip. Symmetrically, the AI could hit your tank, see that you have way too high deflection, and decide that it should go somewhere else based on that information, just like the player does. There would be no unfair advantage for the AI here. EDIT: If I killed a bunch of darguls before, their deflection would already be shown before I make a deflection-targeting action against them. The bestiary could stay empty all the game and you still had a means to look into the enemies stats.

The talents you see at the beginnung are the multiclass talents that will be available in the expansion. It's one talent for every class other than your own and they are displayed in the class section. Here is a reference of what I believe we know so far: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/80598-white-march-new-talents/

As soon as the information was in the combat log for the first time, it is open information to everyone - for example, the defenses are displayed immediately at the tooltip of an enemy after you targeted them. With the 2.0 patch, you even get a hit percentage as additional information. The bestiary just gives you the information even before you strike a first blow against a specific defense, it is not necessary at all to fight against enemies multiple times to get that information. Incorporating this knowledge into the enemy AI would hardly be unfair in my opinion since the player can make informed choices based on these informations all the time (and is even encouraged to do so), and I doubt that the AI will ever be clever enough make the smartest decisions involving these information to own the player. Don't get me wrong here, I'm sure it's hard as hell to code a proper AI which can't be easily abused and still makes somehow smart decisions revolving engagement and so on. My main point is that the old AI behaviour where the enemy never disengaged differs quite a lot from a potential AI where the enemy frequently disengages with regards to how an ideal defensive character should look like. A highly specialized tank which won't be attacked is a useless waste of space. Improving AI is the most efficient but probably the most difficult way to shake up the tank & spank strategy. Even then, afflictions are still way too powerful and the level design still encourages you to position high defensive characters as blockers for the most part. Still, PoE has quite some potential to improve on these things, so it'll be interesting for me to see what the actual 2.0 AI brings to the table.

That's how I read your post at first, bruce I'm not sure if this a statement about me or about my opinion of you, though I guess it's the latter

Well that is the bigger problem, the enemy AI and path finding needs to get smart enough to not get bottled in when they aren't engaged and break engagements from the puny tanks that can't deal damage when they are. This is basically the single biggest problem with the game right now, I'm sure they know this and trying to trying to improve the game in those areas, if they do, engagement will be better and Defender along with it, if they fail then both Defender and Hold the Line will be pretty pointless, and combat of the game with continue to suffer from the same tedious tactics it often has now. This is exactly what I was trying to say all along. If you sacrifice all of your accuracy and dps for godly defenses, then the disengagement attack can safely be neglected from the point of view of the attacker, so it's just strictly better to go after another target. Continuing this thought, a rational enemy would ignore the engagement to your tanks completely, unless they can do some damage. As this is not the case in the base game where enemies just stick to the first target they get, of course it is strictly better to just pump your defenses. However, if you would change the enemy AI to be more clever about this, engagement shifts its role: You give the enemy the choice between forgoing a weaker target or eating a disengagement hit, which is a more dynamic effect and probably how it was intented all along. In particular, it's more important to balance DPS against defenses and maybe change it with modals to adjust to the situation (rush into the enemies with defender modal, they jog past you and eat some disengagement hits, switch to another modal). Of course, this is not the reality of the game at the moment (in particular, I don't have access to the patch beta, but I doubt the AI is that good at the moment - even then, I don't mind being positively surprised in a week), but if it arrived at this point sometime in the future, that would be great. Even then there are some pitfalls regarding level design with too many chokepoints and other issues like exploits of AI with regards to engagement, but depending on tweaking the AI, engagement may become useful. I'm not even claiming it's the best thing ever, but at least I can see it becoming viable to use the 2.0 defender mode when the AI went up some levels. Not for the purpose of defense, but for the purpose of intimidating the AI to move past your front line.

At some backing tier (which gives the silver badge), the addon was included, but I don't recall at which pledge level exactly. Pledges below the threshold had to buy it separately. I had the physical collectors edition and I know that I get the addon for free.

So there are two new high level talents for the monk: - According to this video, summoning a fire and an ice copy of yourself to beat the crap out of everything - According to josh in some quote I don't want to search for now, a passive ability that gives DT for each wound Nice!

You probably didn't follow these forums but the system was designed the way it is just to counter the heavy amount of misses in the first place, and until some time into development there weren't any misses planned at all. In particular, the chances to convince the game designers that there aren't enough misses are pretty slim. I personally think that affliction graces are too powerful, but revamping that system seems to be pretty complicated.

Where did you read it would increase? This is probably a unique weapon trait which won't grow, at least that's my understanding. 15% is about instakilling an enemy every 6 hits, which seems reasonable to me - in the time you need to make 6 hits, the enemy should probably be dead anyway, especially if it is lower level than you. If it turns out to be too powerful or someone uses it to cheeze through the game consistently, they still can change it in a later patch. Compare it to a critical hit which should instakill low level enemies as well.

I don't see the problem with instakill weapons when they work as described - the chance is not particular high, they only work against some kind of enemy type and even then they only work if the enemies level is below yours. If you're overleveled it just speeds up killing the enemies, if you're at the level you are supposed to be for an area, then it still won't make the game a cakewalk since you can only thin out the smaller enemies anyway. Of course, this rises and falls with the way experience is distributed over the course of the game, but the described implementation doesn't strike me as overly out of the bounds of PoE. Btw, randomized unique loot should go die in a fire concerning PoE.