Doppelschwert

For each class, there will be at least one soulbound weapon they can bind to, so your priest will be able to bind something. As has been said before, the general talent weapon focus applies to all of these regardless of type, but it is not known whether the priest diety buff will work as well with anything. Making a reasonable argument to josh, this might get patched in if it is not already available from the start. Still, you can probably expect that there won't be a soulbound greatsword for priests, but I don't see how that is a flaw of the weapons instead of a flaw of the diety weapon focus. There are 5 gods for priests, so to cover all the diety weapon focus talents you would need 5 different soulbound weapons for priests to be available. There are probably 4 soulbound weapons in the expansion, given that they are expensive to make (and that number would cover each class once given what we know), so it doesn't work even if you make everything available to everyone (which would make it bland as hell in the process). Depending on the implementation, you should expect your bonus to apply to the priest soulbound weapon, but it probably won't be a greatsword.

Slow down and speak for yourself there. The lead designer of the game thinks this about the point of class balance: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/70501-best-talents/page-2 This means that if a class has an option which is strictly better than other options (for the same class), it will be tuned down. Comparing defender to cautious attack, that was the case and it got nerfed. Got it nerfed too much? Probably, but some nerf was required to meet the self imposed design goal of the devs. That means that balancing of this game is not concerned with powergaming primarily, which some people seem to have trouble understanding on these boards. On one hand, some people argue this is a single player game so nerfing shouldn't be considered as no balance is needed, but on the other hand, people want the fighter to be buffed because apparently balance is a thing in single player games anyway. The point is, there will always be a least interesting and/or weakest option to play with. But because this is a single player game, this is ok. This is not an MMORPG where you are punished for picking the wrong class 80 levels and 6 months ago and now you can't change it anymore. You will always be able to make it through PoE with your characters when you know what you are doing. I could create a party of only fighters and play through PotD if I wanted to, defender nerf or not. That's not to say that the nerfing or buffing can't get on levels where its entirely ridicioulous, but I doubt that level is reached with the fighter at this point as several people pointed out that fighters are excellent off tanks still. The fighter is clearly intended for people that like low maintaince. Given that, you can't make his potential as big as any maintaince heavy character, because why would you want to play the active character then when it is so much more work. A fighter is reliable and surely better than a badly played caster, so the tradeoff is low maintaince for blandness. That may be hard for powergamers to understand but there are people that will readily sacrifice power for a more relaxed way to play. I'm not arguing for or agains the fighter being balanced at the moment, but this seems to be a concept that is hard to understand somehow. The design goal of PoE is that you can come up with any character concept and succesfully play it through the game, which you can and still will be able to do after 2.0. If you feel fighters don't reach your powergaming level, then, well, don't play a fighter. There are still a lot of other people which will pick the fighter nonetheless.

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but I guess you have some information I'm lacking, because I don't understand some of the arguments. 1) If you change from a fighter with defender pre-2.0 to a fighter with defender 2.0, you loose 20 deflection, alright. That's hitting hard I guess, but why wouldn't you compare the class pre-2.0 with defender to 2.0 with cautious attack? Thats a difference of 5 points in deflection and increases the damage taken from 17.5% to 22.5%. At the same time, a paladin in 1.06 can achieve the exact same value of deflection as a fighter with defender, which would mean that 17.5% compared to 22.5% would be the comparison between the paladin and the fighter in 2.0 if I did't miss anything. Arguing with a loss of 20 points when its actually 5 is a bit dramatic in my eyes. My resumee would be that fighters clearly loose deflection and are not the class with the most available deflection anymore, but the difference to the other classes doesn't strike me as so big it makes them useless. 2) I don't know how a wizard would heal himself. 3) I don't know why the multiclass talents are described so one-sided. If you give your fighter lore and invest in some ingredients, you can have a lot of those powerful spells at your disposal. That doesn't even cost you a talent. You don't want to argue that you need them every single battle, do you? 4) Multiclass talents include a charm spell, an accuracy aura, a small debuff to enemies defenses and a summon. To me, this is hardly useless stuff. As a short summary: I - agree fighters got nerfed - agree Defender might be kind of useless in the new version depending on AI - agree that fighters will be worse tanks - disagree that fighters niche is to be a tank, they are better suited to be an offtank - disagree that fighters will be that much worse overall because of the patch - disagree that casters are that much better off, given that there are scrolls available to everyone I will leave it (and the thread) at that. I can see the frustration, but for me its not that bad if you put it into perspective, especially given that there is so much stuff I still don't know (higher level fighter abilities, AI, soulbound fighter gear in the expansion, etc). By the way, I will probably start a fighter as a main for the expansion, which won't be a tank.

As far as I remember, you are not locked into killing any of them. Might even kill both if you feel like it, so you can say you'll kill kolsc and come back anytime to finish the job. Just make a save and try it out.

By that logic, you might as well argue they wanted to do an MMORPG but couldn't because of money constraints. Seriously, the game got backed for the most part because people wanted it to turn out like it is now. Everything else is wishful thinking.

I don't know, you sound a bit overdramatic here I think. While the casters will get new spells, the fighter will also unlock a new tier of talents, so without knowing them, it's hard to say how much they fall behind. We also don't know if 3rd level spells will actually be per encounter, and immunity to defenses will affect casters as well. Fighters were not only described as defenders before the game was released but also as low maintaince, and low maintaince is the theme they still adhere to most after all of the revisions - the class is designed to be bland and passive. And in the same way the multiclass talents give the other classes access to regeneration, the fighter gets access to more utility talents. Furthermore, this is a beta. They make balancing adjustments all the time to see how it affects the game, and josh especially likes to make drastic changes to values to get a better picture, he stated that numerous times in interviews. Nevertheless, concerning engagement: Assume the AI is better in the sense that they will break engagement more often and eat an engagement hit. That means the paladin with high defenses won't get to use them that often as enemies don't attack him that much, while his decreased DPS won't even hurt the enemies that much. If offense capabilities of the defender factor into the decision to disengage, then it's actually better to have a mix of good defenses and moderate DPS, which the fighter is closer to than the paladin. The change of AI might actually be more of a nerf to the paladin than to the fighter, but I don't know since I'm not part of the beta patch. Personally, I think we need more information about the finalized version of 2.0 to make a better judgement call. I would argue more about specifics, but since I'm a GoG user I'm locked out of the patch beta, so I don't even know how the new AI and engagement works. Might go in the direction of your worst case scenario, might not. We'll see.

I think a nice solution to keep both defender and cautious attack interesting could be if defenders deflection adjustment would scale to the number of enemies that you are engaged with. It should be worse than cautious attack at 0-1 engagements, even at 2 and better for 3 or more. Something like +[7.5 * #engaged] for #engaged >1, 0 otherwise. Thats probably not the solution you want to hear, but that would make it an actual choice between defender and cautious attack without trivializing both, if that was the motivation for the nerf in the first place.

Well, did the new beta patch update change anything regarding defender?

They also say in the article that there will be 15 new maps. In http://www.pcgamer.com/the-story-of-pillars-of-eternity-the-white-march-part-i/ they say that the parts will be sold separately and that the first part is self-contained, e.g. there won't be cliffhangers.

Also, Part I is auto-conclusive and Part II will deal with the consequences of what happens in Part I. Nice, but I think this quote is also interesting: In particular, looks like they will be sold separately, which kind of makes sense but will fuel the DLC/expansion debate I guess.

Well, I can get behind those points. I just think from the devs points of view, it now fits more into the general tone of the character system that the modal gives some 'advantage' (more engagement) for some disadvantage (less deflection). This is true for almost every modal (I can only think of the monk duality one that doesn't fit into this rule now). We'll see if this is just a momentary picture during rebalancing or the intended situation when the expansion is released I guess. I agree that defender is subpar at the moment, but personally I also think that it was too much of a no-brainer before the nerf. We'll see if there can be a middleground through proper rebalancing. If you have social media, you should just try to ask josh about it on his tumblr.

Well, I'm just stating what I think are understandable reasons from the point of view from the devs. Feel free to disagree with them and critize the way it's been handled, but I think the changes they made fit the motivations I offered: 1) You may think its pointless, but it works as I described it. IF you want to make a tank fighter now, you WILL take cautious attack, whereas before you never did. You can't compare defender to cautious attack anymore because they make totally different things now, and as you can only maintain one at the same time, there is a choice where none has been before. 2) Well, understandably you are angry/dissappointed about the change. I don't know if 7 points of deflection really make or break a class, however. 3) I think it promotes the choice of diversity, because you only take defender now if you care about the engagement limit, whereas before you would've also taken it for fights against single enemies as the deflection alone made it valuable. Even if you wanted to only go for the engagement limit before, you couldn't. If a class had A and B and another class had only B, i wouldn't call them diverse, I would think B is strictly worse. If one has A and the other B, thats diversity because they are mutually exclusive. Thats exactly the situation with fighter, paladin, engagement limit and high deflection. Before and after 2.0. 4) I'm pretty sure the model will change. At the moment, you have a party of 6 and its totally viable to have one tank and the rest ranged DPS on most difficulties. If you increase damage taken enough, this will clearly shift to either requiring more tanks or more ressources into healing. Party setups and strategies shift that way. 5) I never said that this was a nerf to tanks in general. The attribute change is a nerf to tanks in general, thats about it. This change promotes cautious attack for fighters, which are the only class that had no reason to pick it up if they wanted to tank, so goal accomplished. As I said before, I don't think you are supposed to use defender against small to medium hordes of enemies but against a lot of small, light-hitting ones. Since you have cautious attack to fill the gap that the old defender left, not much really changes. Take cautious attack instead of defender and only take defender if you think that engagement limit is useful (which is debatable). Again, I'm sorry for your anger about this issue, but I think my arguments represent some realistic explanations for the changes.

The advantage in unarmed is mainly the availability of inherent quality enchantment. As soon as you hit the level where you are supposed to use weapons with fine / exceptional / superb qualities, the fists automatically get these advantages as well, and I think they are quite fast given that they deal crush damage. It's nice to dual wield a sword and a fist to cover up all physical damage types at once, although it's clearly not very optimized in terms of playing the game in the best possible way. Still, from a RP point of view, I really love that the game lets me do that quite efficiently. It emulates a guy that uses one handed swords who occasionally uses his free hand as well, which is probably more close to actual fighting with a single weapon, at least for me. Having said that, you still lose all the enchantments you could have on weapons if you are unarmed, so in a sense the unarmed monk is already slightly inferior to the monk fighting with weapons. How a version that is even more inferior to this should be lucrative is puzzling me as well from an efficiency point of view, but I'll surely make a non-monk character that uses his fists for RP reasons at some point in time.

Apart from starting a new game, you might want to sneak southwards to the coastal area, it should be two maps below the village on the map. As far as I can remember, the old women that lives in the south of this map lets you rest, but it might as well be that she expects you to solver her quest first. That's all I can think of without checking ingame.

Personally, I think this is exactly the reason why the ability got nerfed - to not have a strictly better version of cautious attack, so that there is actually a reason you might want to take cautious attack. Since defender is a modal after all, you're probably intended to use it mostly against large group of small, weak enemies now, where it is assumed that you don't necessarily need the additional deflection. I get that everyone is upset because their precious abilities are nerfed (josh actually predicted that anything of the bigger things he will nerf after release will summon a reaction like that), but at the same time, consider the feedback the game got, especially here on the forums: Tank & Spank is an easy strategy that trivializes the game and CC/summons are way too strong, CON sucks. So what did they do now? Nerfing deflection across the board by changing the attributes while making CON slightly stronger, nerfing summons, nerfing afflictions partially, buffing party AI, nerfing strictly better talents for talents which have pros and cons. For a tank, you ideally want to have both a lot of deflection and a lot of engagement capacity. The paladin keeps his high deflection but has issues with engagement, the fighter stays on top with engagement (if you want that) but is now slightly weaker in the deflection department (and that is considering that in a way you metagame your paladin to get the highest bonus, the comparison isn't even against the average paladin). Personally, I think it's a good thing the classes have slightly different ways to go about tanking now. I think from josh's point of view, that's a very smart way to go about his balancing goals to have nontrivial choices in character building while making the classes distinct from each other. I don't think this was about 'Fighter as a tank is too strong, so we have to nerf him', it's rather 'Paladin and Fighter as a tank are too similiar, so we have to change them'.

Given this video at around the 2 minutes mark http://www.ign.com/videos/2015/08/06/pillars-of-eternity-the-white-march-gameplay-demo-ign-live-gamescom-2015 one can make an educated guess as to what most of the unknown abilities do by their name alone. Already known and unchanged: - Barbarian: Frenzy - Chanter: Summon Skeleton (If their Bones Sleep Still Under that Hill, None Can Say) - Cipher: Charm (Whisper of Treason) - Fighter: Constant Recovery - Rogue: Sneak Attack Changed: - Wizard: Magic Missile (Can't read the first part, but it says missile -> hopefully, blast is a general talent, which would make me even more happy) New Information: - Monk: Unarmed damage (Novices Suffering as an allusion to transcended Suffering) - Paladin: Accuracy Aura (Gallants Focus as an allusion to Zealous Focus) - Priest: Radiance (Acolythes Radiance as an allusion to Holy Radiance) - Ranger: Wounding Shot (Runners Wounding Shot) - Druid: Natures Mark (Aspirant's Mark as an allusion, although I'm unsure as I never play them) Overall, I'm pretty happy with this list. There seems to be a lot of opportunities to come up with fun character concepts in terms of what they will be able to do. I hope the active abilities will be per encounter though, otherwise it would be hard to justify taking them, given that they are already weaker than their counterparts. If they are per encounter, I really like the change of the wizard talent, the paladin aura and the radiance addition.

Many thanks obsidian! Are the new talents in the patch or are they exclusive for the expansion? If they are in, might anyone with a steam copy list them here?

Speaking of, it is going to be missing tons of changes. Our code base was recombined after our last patch so it is very difficult to pull out fixes from it. Most of the larger fixes are listed, but many of the smaller changes/fixes were not included. We will release the change log when the beta update is released, but we will be updating it before it goes live. No worries, take your time. Any chance on spoiling some highlights not mentioned in the white march trailer to make us hyped in the meantime?

Respec is coming with the expansion / patch 2.0. Starting companions at LVL1 is already available, but you have to enable it in the options menu.

Yeah, those. There are also items like the Boots of Stability, and some rings, IIRC. I'm mostly just noting that the code for resistances to particular afflictions already exists in the game, so if the devs want to add those kind of affliction resistances to enemies willy-nilly, there's no barrier to doing so. Fair enough, I see what you mean now. The way I understood some of joshs comments makes me believe they use talents because you can't directly affect the resistances against afflictions in their editor, so instead they check the availability of those talents when the affliction method is called. In particular, if what I believe is true, then it's quite a lot of work to give enemies distinct values to those resistances by assigning new talents, because the number of checks for individual talents explodes in the affliction code, so you want the sources of these resistance talents small and manageable. At least I think it worked somehow like that in NWN2. I understood your earlier comment to mean that they can manipulate the values directly in their editor already, hence my confusion by your remark.

I think athletics is the only thing that doesn't scale properly to higher levels, everything else scales quite well. Even then, you can have arbitrary high skill checks in scripted interactions to make athletics or other skills worthwhile, so you can always easily give incentives to maximize them. Besides, since you gain a fixed number of skill points per level but the costs grow quadratically, the game automatically favours raising low stats over specializing too heavily. Besides balancing, I'm sure that this was setup to make skills still relevant in the high levels, because you need to raise the level cap by quite some margin to make an additional point in a skill possible at all, diminishing the need to come up with higher skill-checks in the long run.

Coastal Aumaua and mountain dwarves both have specialized defense bonuses, and there are talents covering basically every type of effect. I guess you mean stuff like 'Mentral Fortress' or 'Body Control'? In that case, I knew about them (also mentioned them indirectly before) but my point is, they are grouped, so you can't separate them in any combination. It's not possible to have an arbitrary combination of increased resistance against afflictions. That's totally fine for the player, but I think it would be nice to make that even more diverse on enemies, as long as it makes sense somehow and is properly portrayed in the encyclopedia entries.

Huh, I didn't know that. Is that in the encyclopedia or do you have to calculate it from the data in the combatlog by comparing different saving throws? If it's the latter, it's kind of obscure. In general, although I agree that things might get confusing (and too much rock-paper-scissor-esque) if you overdo immunities, I think categorial and consistent immunities to afflictions would be no problem when they are properly explained in the encyclopedia and the combat log.

It seems you missed some subtle things about how PoE works. No matter how much DR you have, 20% of the (minimum ?) damage will still be taken. So high DR does not equal immunity. On the other side, you might want to have a monster that is immune to charm, but not against fear. Raising its will save will make it immune to both, so that way you are inflexible. At the same time, there are some afflictions which can be gotten from abilities against different saves, so you can make the monsters only immune against packages of afflictions. Immunities are a way more elegant solution to this.

melnorme asked: So, what turned the tide in favor of implementing damage immunities in PoE? Will PCs and NPCs be able to acquire them with items/spells/etc or is it just for monsters? Time and the increase of the damage output curve at higher levels. Currently damage immunity is an armor property on certain creatures only. If it becomes a status effect in the future, it could be put on player spells, items, abilities, etc. http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/125279970376/so-what-turned-the-tide-in-favor-of-implementing